The story is a bit similar to the one I wrote about deli. It is partly about quality and partly about money.

It is always great to buy produce at the high of the season. Fruit and veggies are plentiful, so you can get them fresh, ripe and cheap, especially if, like me, you go to the producer directly. Freshness and ripeness are quite important. Only at that stage, produce will contain the highest levels of nutrients. Just like with my story about the deli, it is also important to find a producer that does not pump the veggies with lots of water and fertilizers, because then all you get is a dilution of nutrients and you end up buying more water than you should. Also, the produce tends to spoil faster. Perhaps, the best place I can find the right quality is from my own garden. I water my plants but not with the sole purpose of boosting the growth to get more pounds but to allow the plants to grow harmoniously. I compost all food scraps and that compost goes in my garden. I look for the optimal combination of yield and quality. In my garden, I try to produce more than we can eat in the high season so that I can preserve the surplus, either by freezing, which I do mostly with vegetables, or by canning, which I do mostly with fruit. I suppose that I also could make jams but I do not have much of a sweet tooth. I do make compote of rhubarb, though, which I freeze for later, as my rhubarb produces like crazy in the summer. I hope for you that you have the opportunity to taste produce that you can harvest at the top of ripeness and eat the same day. Nothing beats that. For me the top is with strawberries. The ones from my garden are not particularly big but how fantastic they taste! The stuff I find in stores just does not seem to handle the logistics from producer to store very well and they are loaded with water. I had stopped eating strawberries altogether until I moved here and started my own garden.

I am also lucky to have orchardists as neighbours and I like to buy their fruit especially when they are so ripe that they start to show some little defects that do not sell very well. There is nothing with the taste, on the contrary, but they show some browning and spots, so the orchardist, sells them at a discount. That is when I buy a large quantity of fruit for canning. At first, I thought that canning was complicated but actually it also can be done in the oven, which saves a lot of the problems of dealing with boiling water. I can do 12 cans at a time in my oven, so it goes rather quickly. For all my winter needs, it just takes a couple of days of chaos in the kitchen but it worth the “hassle”. I can enjoy tasty sweet fruit all winter long, until the new season arrives because unfortunately, in the winter, the fruit that I can buy around here is not very tasty. It is expensive and often hardly ripe, or it has ripened artificially, but that does not give the same taste and the same nutrients as naturally ripened fruit. I hardly eat any banana anymore. Yet, I love bananas, but the stuff they sell around here is really sad. The bananas are usually green and they hardly turn yellow as they seem in a hurry to turn all brown and the taste is weird. I remember eating fully ripened bananas in Hawaii and that was something else. Oranges vary a lot in quality and more than half the time, they just taste dull and woolly, so I also gave up on them, except for one brand of heirloom oranges from California. I was a bit suspicious that the heirloom concept might be a bit of a marketing scam but it is not. Those oranges are really great but they are available only for a short period. Grapefruit are usually more constant in quality and that is almost the only fruit that I buy in stores nowadays. Even apples and pears are a bit sad in the winter time.

Veggies I prefer to freeze than canning. I find that they keep more of their crispiness that way but that is my personal preference. From my garden, I freeze green beans, peas, zucchini, parsley and basil mostly. I also freeze the juice of one of the varieties of grapes that I have in my vineyard, as those are just as good as tale grapes. For the rest I make wines, which is also a delicious way of preserving grapes. Those are a treat for the winter time, because just like for fruit, the vegetables that are off season come from further away and have lost some of their freshness. As for my potatoes, onions, shallots and garlic, they do fine in my basement and I can enjoy them all through the winter.

It takes some time, but as I have mentioned earlier, once you have learned how to do it, it does not take all that much time and it is really worth it. It is worth it in terms of quality and taste, but it is also worth it in terms of money because, everything that I preserve for the winter is really cheap when I buy it in the high season, and of course even cheaper when it comes from my garden.

And once again, preserving produce is a great combination of a healthy and nutritious diet; it saves money and reduces the amount of food that is wasted. The triple bottom line wins again!

© 2019 – Christophe Pelletier – The Happy Future Group Consulting Ltd.