In June the school year is winding down, spring fever is rampant in the office, and my choral commitments have drawn to a close with end-of-season concerts for both the Eugene Symphony Chorus and the Eugene Chamber Singers. So it's in June that I begin to concentrate on my other life - the more "rural" life.
Perhaps it's because I live only a block from Eugene's former downtown mall, with no real garden space of my own...or perhaps it's because my 1914-era kitchen conjures up images of a farm kitchen and a time before "convenience food"...but gradually more and more of my summer "leisure" time has been devoted to one of life's absolute basics: hunting for, gathering, and preserving fruits and vegetables.
I started modestly years ago with one type of jam: as soon as the Register-Guard ran its annual article about the local strawberry harvest, I'd be off to pick a few buckets - preferable organic. I soon found that I could eat strawberries endlessly but am allergic to their leaves - something apparently not uncommon. Undeterred, I rolled down my sleeves and carried water in the car so I could rinse my hands. Now while other happy pickers bask in the sunny strawberry fields with bare arms, legs, and heads, I'm easily distinguishable as the woman in the big straw hat with no visible skin.
Slowly but surely I added to my jam repertoire, and branched out into chutney as well. One of my good friends lives on five acres with an orchard, so in the autumn I'd always end up with buckets and boxes of apples for pies, chutney, and apple butter. Now I'm gardening out at her farm as well - still in the floppy hat, and with the added scenic value of overalls, knee pads, and gumboots - and my best crop is always tomatoes - leading to yet more chutney!
In the winter months I seek out appealing recipes in old cookbooks. I find those published before 1920 have the most variety of preserve recipes, as well as some of the most "interesting" instructions. But once summer arrives, I tend to ignore those carefully xeroxed and filed recipes and create my own.
What do I do with all this bounty? Well, there is only so much jam and chutney that two people can eat, although my husband certainly eats a heroic amount of the latter! So favoured friends and acquaintances receive them as gifts. One out-of-town friend even told me that her popularity with some of her other friends rested on a steady supply of my chutneys to share. And I'll never forget seeing the photo of a half-eaten jar of my jam sitting on the table in a French kitchen. Sacré bleu!
Picking fruits and vegetables is every bit as hot, sweaty, and strenuous as gardening, depending on what you are after. Even if you start off early in the morning, by the time you've picked twenty pounds of cherries or several buckets of raspberries, you're ready for a shower and some iced tea. But it's all so satisfying. The air is smells like summer, the afternoon breezes are refreshing, bird (and insect) life is all around, tasting is allowed, and if you happen to be picking in a popular place on the weekend there is the added fun of eavesdropping. You'd be surprised by the things I've heard people discuss in the blueberry bushes! It seems no topic is too personal.
Of course, once all the produce comes home, it's a little daunting. I try to pick early on a Friday or Saturday, so that I have plenty of time to devote to canning (especially important when cooking chutney, which needs to cook down for hours). And that's one real downside of this summer activity: canning jams and preserves is a steamy-hot business. With a canner full of jars and water, which must come to a boil and then be boiling for at least half an hour, and a pot of jam which one must basically sit over and stir for that same half hour, my south-facing kitchen gets very hot. But it's all worth it in the winter, when I open up a jar of Harriett's Heavenly Homemade sour cherry jam, or my husband spreads some hot tomato chutney on his cheese sandwich. We've got the taste of summer in our mouths all winter long.