Preserving

September is Eat Local Challenge month, and of course, I signed up. I try to do this even in months when there is no challenge.

I like this month's theme, though: the beginning of the harvest and turning our thoughts toward preserving our food. I love all the blogs about people canning their harvest, and all the wonderful pictures of glorious jars on shelves, but let me be honest: I'm food preservation challenged in the biggest way.

I grew up typical 60s American suburban. Our food came from the grocery store - in cans, boxes, and preferably frozen. TV dinners were the rage. Add to that a mother who worked full-time and who hated fish, cheese, and mushrooms. When it came to most of our meals, it needed to say Swanson or Chef Boy-ar-Dee. I was 16 before I saw a fresh strawberry.

My mother grew up on a farm in Texas and she hated everything to do with it. She hardly ever talked about it and I never heard her pine for the fresh vegetables of her youth. Except for okra. When okra was in season, she bought it by the bushel-full and mixed it up with cornmeal and salt, deep-fried it, and we'd sit at the table eating pounds of it. I still love that stuff. She also bought yellow squash and cooked it with a cream sauce and lots of pepper. I loved that, too.

So you can see it was unusual to ever get "fresh," let alone freshly grown. And the idea of canning anything - well, the idea just never occured. I didn't even know the average human being could do that kind of thing. If you had asked me, I probably would have said it came from a factory somewhere. Everyone knows that!

I've done some canning over the last few years. Just fruit - chutneys, sauces, butters - easy stuff. I've never even tried jams because the idea of using pectin makes me nervous. I'm not sure what it is, you see. Any other food I want to preserve, I do by freezing. I'm the freeze queen, or I would be if I actually had something other than the side compartment to our Amana. I'd love to buy a chest freezer but what do I do about our famous California brown-outs and blackouts? Does a freezer need a separate generator?

So here's my problem: I'm totally enamored of Real Food. I would love to spend days cooking and canning all kinds of fresh produce, in all kinds of exciting ways. But I need a teacher. I need people to do it with, who'll talk and laugh and have a good time while we work. Who'll show me what pectin looks like and how to use it. Who know how to use a pressure canner or what the saurkraut is supposed to look like after a few days. People with Experience.

It would be so cool to really know how to do it.