afieldnotebook

Yesterday at the farm we were encouraged to collect the early apples that had fallen off their apple tree--little bitter green ones, but Ralph (the farmer) told us they were good for pie. I figured apple butter is just like pie without the crust, looked up some recipes, and ended up using this one, though I used my hand blender because I don't have a food mill, replaced about half the sugar with honey, and made a half-batch (I ended up with 2 pints of butter, I'm not sure how much apple I had because I never weighed them). This was my first experiment with canning, and I'd say it's a success (the cans have sealed!).

Volunteering at the CSA and "eating in season" has, for me, meant figuring out how to use what I'm given instead of what I want. Produce needs to be dealt with before it goes bad, and I don't always want to make a pie (not to mention eat one) when I get fruit. Last week I made blackberry-mulberry cobbler, because it's easier than pie; lately I've been making a lot of soup with my vegetables (including radish soup...I don't recommend radish soup) because I don't want to throw them all in a salad and a little goes a long way with soup. I am also figuring out what produce I want enough to buy: lemons, mostly. Is this an unqualified success? No, not really; it doesn't feel like much, either, in terms of lessening my environmental impact. But maybe that's the way it should be, because the fact is this is starting to feel just like living, like part of my life, and isn't that what food should be? Once a week I help harvest the food I eat the rest of the week. There's some rightness to that, I think, regardless of whether it makes much of a difference on the large scale.

But back to canning: canned goods always make me think of Greg Brown and summer, probably because of his song "Canned Goods" and because the primary object of our canning at home was strawberries. What I'm trying to say is: this is the music I'm listening to this summer.
It's eclectic at best, and would include Greg Brown's "Summer Evening" but I couldn't upload it.