Summer Fun with Food

I've been inspired by the book I've been reading this summer--Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle--to take more time to find local produce for meals and for preserving. My mom always canned a lot when we were kids, since she was raised on a farm where the kitchen garden fed the family during summer and winter.

In June, my sister, my neighbor and I picked strawberries at Johnson's, which were enjoyed fresh with cereal, strawberry shortcake, and the rest are in the freezer as whole berries or freezer jam.

In July, I made a quick trip to Stateline blueberry farm, and several pounds. Some turned into a blueberry buckle which kept us grinning for a week of desserts, and the rest were frozen as whole berries.

In August, I froze some corn, which is as easy as boiling the cobs for a few minutes and cutting the kernels into a freezer bag. The best corn we have tasted this year is from Bultema's farmstand on Route 30 in Lynwood. That same week, my friend Emily came over to show me how to make a loaf of bread from scratch. We finished the morning by enjoying a tomato sandwich on LaBriola panini bread which we can get at Ron Erik's Village Farmstand in Cal City.

My next project was some jalapeno-mint jelly, which is the first boil-processed canning I've ever tried without my mom around. I made one small batch which only turned into about 5 4-oz jars, but the pale green jelly looks beautiful, and it used up a ton of mint which grows wild near our garage. That gave me enough confidence to try canning a small batch of Michigan freestone peaches, and the 7 pints I processed came out just fine, and they all did that vacuum seal pop thing.

We used three more Michigan peaches to make a batch of homemade peach ice-cream on Labor Day weekend. For my birthday, Jeff gave me an ice-cream bowl attachment for the Kitchen Aid mixer, so we had to try this out when Jeff's family came for dinner. The initial result is a soft serve consistency ice cream, but we put the rest in a container to freeze solid. I tried some this morning and it is absolutely delicious. This is fun! I'll never be so ambitious as to put up the bushels and bushels that Grandma Cora always did, but I feel proud of these little attempts to help our household consume more produce from local growers.

If the baby waits till the end of the month, and my mom and I can pick a date to get together, September will bring some jars of applesauce using apples from County Line Orchard and stewed tomatoes using tomatoes from Buiter's farm.