Weekends Putting Up Food

It's that time of year. Eating locally all year in New England means putting up food for the winter. And if you work all day during the week, putting up food for the winter means spending a chunk of every weekend in August and September doing so. But mostly I enjoy it, thank goodness. This weekend we froze another 20 pounds of tomatoes along with several pounds of zucchini and red peppers.

We also took our first crack at drying apples--Macs from Clarkdale--with great success. We gave them no pretreatment, so the final product was a bit brown, but that doesn't bother me. The flavor is stupendous, way better than dried apples from the store. And the texture is perfect--soft and chewy. To prepare them, we used our apple peeler/slicer/corer to make rings, then dried them in the dehydrator for about 8 hours. Fortunately, we'll be able to get apples all through the winter, so we can make additional dried ones as desired; no need to go crazy stocking up right now when everything else is begging to be dealt with. I am looking forward to trying different varieties and seeing how the dried flavor varies.