This is the time of year when there is an absolute abundance of vegetable goodness on the homestead so The Happy Homesteader is spending the day putting it up for winter. Green beans and shredded zucchini already fill the freezer from yesterday’s efforts. The green beans will be welcome when kale and spinach are the only things growing in my winter greenhouse, and the shredded zucchini can be easily added to a batch of oat bran muffins. Today, the cooked squash and zucchini, tomato basil soup and vegetable stock is in the works and those will be just as welcome when the temperatures hover in the teens. Yum!
A vendor at the farmer’s market where I sell microgreens (who is also a vegetarian) told me how he uses all the extra squash and zucchini that he doesn’t sell. I thought it was an excellent idea so I’ve copied him. I chopped squash and zucchini and cooked it with salt, garlic and Italian seasoning. After draining the mixture, I put it in canning jars and put it in the freezer. This winter I will use my friend Jonah’s idea to add the mixture to frozen tomatoes or canned Marinara sauce to make a more “meaty” vegetarian spaghetti sauce. Great idea cause there isn’t a gardener anywhere who doesn’t end up loaded down with extra squash and zucchini!
Organic vegetable broth runs about two bucks a container here in our little corner of the North Carolina mountains. I use one to two boxes every week. Hhmmm. . . seems to make sense to make my own doesn’t it? I’ve been freezing carrot and potato peels, green onion tops and squash and zucchini ends. It all went into the pot today along with garlic, salt and some of my dried thyme, sage and rosemary from the garden. A couple of hours on a low simmer and that will make a couple of quarts of some very delicious broth. Any vegetable tastes better when it’s cooked in broth rather than water, so the more broth I can put by, the better.
And the plum and cherry tomatoes with basil? My friends, that’s gonna be the very first pint this year of The Happy Homesteader’s World Famous Tomato Basil Soup. So easy and soooo good! Just roast some tomatoes — I use Lemon Cherry and Riesentraube Cherry tomatoes along with some plum tomatoes — with garlic and onion until they have a bit of char on them. Then put them in a food processor along with fresh basil and some salt. Puree the mixture and freeze unless — like us — you can’t resist and you just eat it all immediately! The best soup ever. I promise.
The only hindrance to preserving all the good stuff coming out of the garden is that it’s a struggle to find cooler days to work in the kitchen. My big brother is coming to the rescue on that — he’s coming for a visit next month and is bringing a small window air conditioner that he and wife Joan don’t use. It’s not something I want to have running continually but I confess that there will probably be a lot more processing (and maybe even canning!) if I have a cooler kitchen when it’s 85 to 90 degrees outside. And I just ordered a fermenting kit! Can’t wait to put that to use! Sometimes though, even with some air conditioning, a fermenting kit and my new juicer, those useful veggie peelings and ends are still just gonna wind up in the compost pile but that’s okay too. Sometimes, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. But homesteading is about self sufficiency and, whether that means good eats or good soil, it’s all right either way here on The Little Half Acre.
