Longer, slower, cheaper

(Posted by Himanee)

The slide from summer to fall has initiated a round -- slowly -- of fall cleaning. My husband Jim and I ran the Adirondack Marathon in Schroon Lake, NY, on Sunday. We began our round of fall cleaning by moving all the jars of salsa, tomato sauce, tomato paste, catsup, peaches, and various jams that Jim spent the month of August canning into our basement. As we loaded cans, I took a quick inventory:
* tomato paste: 10 jars;
* tomato sauce: 26 jars;
* red salsa: 33 jars;
* green salsa: 4 jars;
* catsup: 22 jars;
* jam: 21 jars;
And there's more to come.

This morning, we woke up to 32 degrees, our third night since September 16 of experiencing overnight frosts. Figuring that the end was near, I harvested the remaining tomatoes from our vines and Jim spent the afternoon transforming the red ones into barbecue sauce. The green ones will become salsa verde (or green salsa), one of our favorite additions to Mexican style pork, chicken, and bean dishes.

As I picked tomatoes, I rejoiced at the sight of geese honking as they flew overhead, our backyard chickens creating a cacophony of clucks as they laid one egg after another, and the glimpse I got this morning of the pear tree in our backyard bearing fruit for the first time since we bought this house in 2011. I felt as if this -- the crisp cold air, the sunny skies, and the "free food" stretching all around me -- was what sustainability meant. It was hard work, with tangible rewards.

The tomatoes are a special pride and joy. For the first time since we started gardening as a way to create our own food, all 160 plants were our own, started from seeds. We sowed three packets of seeds: a hybrid, an heirloom, and a cherry tomato variety. We expected to lose at least half the plants we started to wind, drought, insects and other yard pests. We lost virtually none.

And so we'll eat well through the winter, as the practice of "puttin' up" stretches our harvest through next year.

In the realm of the loca-vore challenge, I experimented tonight with stevia in place of sugar. I picked up a stevia plant at the farmers market this summer, and on the night before our first frost hit, clipped off several of its leafy branches and left them in a sunny spot in my mudroom to dry. To my surprise, the leaves dried fairly and crumbled in my hands this evening as I picked them up. I dropped the crumples into a bowl full of sliced pears and mixed them in well to create a filling for a pear pie. No other sweetening was necessary, though I did replace the requisite cinnamon and nutmeg with a pinch of the garam masala made by my uncle, following my father's family's village recipe.

I also have been making my own butter, and managed to turn the residual buttermilk -- which my father's family referred to as "chaach" -- into a batch of biscuits that also included leftover butternut squash. The biscuits started out as hamburger buns two nights before our marathon, and were breakfast the next day. Today, they formed part of a biscuits and gravy breakfast, and the last few probably will be breakfast tomorrow. Just as the vista of food-producing land seems to connote a sense of sustainability so does my growing ability to make one round of cooking stretch into three or four meals.

Last night we had chicken, slow-cooked in a crockpot. Tonight, we had a rest of the chicken quick-grilled as fajitas. As I made tortillas and the pear pie, I simmered the chicken bones in water. The resulting broth will serve as a base for a seafood paella tomorrow. Because it's very difficult to buy a mixture of seafood for just two people, Jim and I have planned the next three days of meals as a sort of fish fest. Tomorrow, paella's on the menu and will likely feature wild shrimp, mussels, clams, and some sort of locally sourced cod fish (most likely hake) mixed into the rice. The remaining clams will then become a chowder for Thursday, and the mussels a spicy mussel soup on Friday.

Before this year, I thought I would go crazy eating the same food more than one day in a row. I always tried to use up leftovers but often in the crazy pace of life, the leftovers would end up in the trash or compost bin because I hadn't gotten around -- three days later -- to doing chicken dish #2. The easier solution -- and a fresher one, it seems -- is to start with a "big game" meal -- a roasted chicken or a pot roast -- and work down to the small: roast to stir-fry to broth; or slow-cooker dinner to fajitas to broth. The meat stays fresher longer and meals become easier to plan and execute. And, perhaps best of all, the weekly shopping trips to the farmers market end up being less expensive, allowing one to sustain sustainable habits a little longer.