Summer Vegetables

Every summer, my house becomes filled with vegetables. A typical day for me is a whole tomato for breakfast, squash and green beans for lunch, and grilled shish kabobs for supper. It's wonderful; everything is fresh and ripe vibrantly colored. The tomatoes are my absolute favorite, especially pink heirlooms sliced with a sprinkle of Old Bay seasoning. We don't only eat the vegetables however, we also put them up to eat on all winter long. The first major project for us is all things tomato. We make homemade spaghetti sauce, whole stewed tomatoes, and homemade salsa. It is a fairly labor intensive process. First, all of the tomatoes must be washed and have their stem cut out. Then they are placed in a boiling pot of water for the skins to loosen. We transfer the tomatoes to an ice bath in the sink and pull off the skins when they cool. From here, they go into a giant pot on the stove to cook down before being put in mason jars and sealed. The salsa tomatoes go straight from being skinned to a grinder along with peppers, onions, cilantro, and seasoning before being cooked and jarred.

Others vegetables we can in sealed jars are green beans and crowder peas. I have spent many a evening sitting on the patio with a bushel of green beans beside me, snapping away until all stems are gone and all pieces are of adequate length. Not one time in my life has their ever been store bought green beans in my house, and let me tell you, the ones we make ourselves are much tastier. Crowder peas are similar to black eyed peas, and similar to green beans in the fact that I have also spent many an evening shelling crowder peas till my fingers are sore. Some years, we will make green tomato ketchup or can okra, but every year we bag corn. Over the summer, usually at two different times, we will buy 12 dozen ears of corn. We sit out by the pool in our swimsuits with the hose and scrub brush in hand to tackle the task of shucking and silking the corn cobs. It's nice because we can take breaks whenever and cool off in the pool, but it's frustrating because no matter how hard you try you can't get all the silks off a piece of corn. After we have mostly clean cobs, all the corn is cut off the cobs and transferred to a giant pot to cook before being bagged and frozen. It is so great to be able to have fresh tasting corn in the dead of winter. A lot of times when we are going through these processes of putting up vegetables, I will get annoyed or complain about the amount of work. But then I remember how thankful I will be in the winter, so I continue on snapping, silking, or peeling away.