Yes I Can

My first ever canned whole tomatoes

I’ve always thought that the process of canning--putting up food for the winter-- sounded romantic. Not romantic like a candlelit dinner, exactly, or watching a sunset with a handsome guy. But romantic as in I picture a log cabin and the smell of the fire while preparing fruits and vegetables from the garden for the long, blizzard-ridden winter ahead.

I do love log cabins, and I love the smell of a wood fire. In fact, now that I have a real fireplace, instead of just a beautiful but useless marble mantlepiece, I light a fire every night starting in the Fall. And I don’t even mind cleaning up the ashes or hauling in the wood.

But I don’t like the cold and I wouldn’t want to brave an entire winter full of swirling snow without a furnace or a nearby restaurant and grocery store. My Little House in the Prairie scenario has to have a way out.

However, I think there is something to be said for the middle ground and I do believe that we, or at least I, have learned to take our food for granted. I also think consumerism is rampant in our society and that we are burying ourselves in garbage—much of it plastic.

So I have been trying, little by little, to remind myself and my daughter where the food comes from and what is involved in getting it to our table. Moving to a farming town this last year has both inspired that and made it possible.

So putting up some of that food for the winter has naturally followed, at least in my farmer-wanna-be mind. My friend, Karen, who grew up on  a farm, has known how to can her whole life. Every year she grows a huge vegetable garden and when the tomatoes get ripe, she cans like nobodies business.

When she came up for a visit last weekend, I asked her to teach me how to do it. We went out to a local farm and bought a bushel of plum tomatoes and a case of mason jars at the local hardware store. The tomatoes weren’t organic, which I would have preferred, but plum tomatoes are best for canning  because of their low water contents and all I could find locally in organic were other varieties.

So I had to compromise—which I think is my whole point here anyway. I really enjoyed the experience of canning a dozen beautiful glass jars of whole tomatoes. I loved it enough to do some tomato sauce next, both the Italian kind and the spicier Portuguese tomato sauce, and I might even freeze some of the other amazing organic vegetables that grow here so that I can have them in the dead of winter. And I intend to at least move in the direction of growing some vegetables and making more things from scratch.

But I'm not getting rid of my furnace. So there.