Sow There! 5-30 Frozen fruit
The cycle of the seasons can be reflected by the contents of your freezer.
A few weeks ago the bulk of the tomato plants were placed in the ground in my garden.
Wouldn’t you know it, just as this year’s plants have offered their first flowers, we ate the last of last summer’s frozen spaghetti sauce.
That’s pretty good timing.
Likewise, all of those peaches and plums I smugly froze last summer were long ago consumed in morning fruit smoothies.
Knowing the weather will soon be hotter than a dragon’s tongue, I cooked up the last of the pot roast and made quiche with the pie tins, thus clearing up room in the freezer for summer fruit.
My neighbor next door, Bob, has ripe cherries in his tree. Later this summer he’ll have apricots and then peaches.
This week we’ve had sort of a race with the other neighbors who were given permission to pick the cherries.
Tommy shimmied up the tree like a monkey, leaving me on the ground completely freaked out about his safety.
After I snapped photos capturing Tommy’s climbing prowess, I went inside for fear my constant words of caution would cause him to fall.
The neighbors on the other side of the fruit trees must have a really big freezer because they were out there with ladders for most of the weekend, making us wish we had been more greedy on our first trip up the tree.
Now our options are to borrow a bigger ladder than that used by the neighbors, or befriend a group of circus performers to build a human pyramid to reach the tallest limbs.
Harvesting fruit is a romantic task, reminding us that it was only a few generations ago that people managed to eat around worms in apples and kept potatoes in giant bins in their basements.
When I was a child, my mother occasionally did canning. Mom’s best friend from high school lives in Sebastopol and has many fruit trees.
The moms would pile up the kitchen table with boxes of fruit. Each person was given a potato peeler and for hours the moms would sit around and chit-chat.
We kids managed the monotony of peeling fruit by putting on aprons and long skirts and pretending like we were characters on “Little House on the Prairie,” frequently running outdoors to play while the moms continued to work.
Compared to that production, freezing causes much less cleanup.
Through trial and error I’ve found that packing fruit in small sandwich bags in the freezer works best. They store better because they can be shuffled easily when the freezer gets full. Also, the fruit will need to defrost a bit before it can be separated. If stored in sandwich bag-sized amounts, one bag can be transferred to the refrigerator.
Also, we like our smoothies to be cold and icy. Instead of adding ice cubes, frozen grapes work well. They don’t dilute the smoothie and have enough water content to make the morning smoothies have more texture.
I have friends who have lemon trees. Although lemons store very well through the winter, they’re usually gone by the summer months. My friend Shelley squeezes them and freezes the juice in ice cube trays. This way she has a recipe’s worth of lemon juice whenever she needs it.
We’re lucky we live in an area where local produce is so accessible. If it’s not growing next door, you can head to the farmers market downtown and see what is actually in season.
Shoppers get a distorted sense of nature when fruits and vegetables are available year-round in the grocery store. It’s a nice luxury to have anything we want anytime we want it, but it doesn’t quite feel the same when you know the food has been flown from another part of the planet.
If anyone wants to share fruit storing techniques, send a note to my blog so other readers can learn from your experience.
