ISLESBORO, Maine — In Maine gardens, August is the height of the growing season, with good — or lucky — gardeners drowning in oceans of ripening tomatoes, buckets of green beans and overflowing baskets of zucchini and summer squash.
August also is a busy month, with free time a precious resource. So what are good, easy ways to preserve the bounty of the summer harvest to enjoy in the fall and winter? Islesboro food historian, writer and longtime Bangor Daily News cooking columnist Sandy Oliver has as many ideas as she has vegetables waiting to be processed in her kitchen.
What’s the first consideration for gardeners interested in preserving the harvest?
First of all, you have to think about what it is you like to eat. Don’t even bother to preserve anything that you don’t regularly eat. If you do, it will just sit there forever.
I really like tomatoes but feel unsure about making and canning tomato sauce. What else can I do?
If you like to cook tomatoes, one of the easiest things to do is throw a bunch of [raw] tomatoes into a plastic bag and put them in the freezer. In the wintertime, you fish them out, thaw them, throw them into the pot and there you are. It’s as easy as it comes. Nothing tastes exactly like it does when it first comes off the vine, but it’s certainly better than your average store-bought January tomato. That’s not hard to beat, so that’s an easy one.
What about green beans, which are ripening faster than they can be picked, it seems.
I usually blanch mine for about a minute. I snap them into the length I like to cook with and put them into boiling water for about a minute. I drain them and freeze them on cookie sheets before I put them into the freezer bag. Blanching stops the enzyme action. It kills the beans. Vegetables are alive until we cook and eat them. Blanching just stops the maturing process. Everything else goes into the cellar and keeps on trying to grow. It may slow way down in the winter, but there’s something in every vegetable that seems to know spring is on the way.
Well, what’s the best way to keep the vegetables in the cellar edible?
I think people should keep in mind when preserving food that with an awful lot of food, nothing else needs to happen to it other than being put away in a proper environment. If you’ve got root vegetables, it’s good to put them in a place that’s a little bit damp but also cold and dark. Onions like it cool, dark and dry — but not too dry because they dry out. In my house, I have stone walls and a dirt-floor cellar. It’s perfect for all the root vegetables, though I have to take pains to protect them from mice. I’ve had very good luck putting potatoes, carrots, beets and turnips in spackle buckets. I put a nail in the floor joist overhead and hang up the bucket. The mice can’t get in. Apples can be stored like that, too.
It must be very busy in your cellar!
My cellar is sort of like my grocery store, and I go shopping there.
Do you do any canning?
I really love dilly beans, so I make time for that. I make time for bread-and-butter pickles, which I really love. But if it isn’t easy, I can’t do it, either. I’m really not one of those people who’s going to spend hours and hours making the most complicated piccalilli in the world. Keep it simple. You’ll figure out what to do with them in the winter, when you’re not so pressed for time.