Perserving On The Fly

Preserved on the fly: Pickled peppers & frozen veggies.

I am not old enough to remember the Great Depression, but I am old enough to have survived Reaganomics. In the 1980's, my husband worked in the library (and, later, the computer center) of a four-year college. He also served as organist and choir director for a local church. While I was never able to find a full-time position during the '80s, I did my part to bring income in to the household by taking on freelance work as an editor, writer, and book indexer. I also became a master of frugality, learning to make everything from scratch and fixing things rather than replacing them. I did  most of our home repairs, from wiring and plumbing to fence-building and upholstery. Nonetheless, every month we struggled to pay the mortgage of $350, which was almost half of all our combined income.

“The working poor” was the phrase bandied about by media pundits, but Bruce and I preferred to call ourselves “the trickled-on.” Most jobs were minimum wage or non-unionized, near-minimum wage jobs, even the ones requiring a college education. And minimum wage was frozen at $3.35/hr. throughout the 1980's, which meant that by 1989, the buying power of one hour of labor had decreased in value by almost $1 (in 1996 valuation; see  http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0774473.html for the hard statistics). Bruce and I eventually had to let go of our dream of home ownership and move away.

Oh my! Too many peppers! What's a cook to do?!

[This blog entry continues.]

The reason I'm telling you this is to explain my occasional (make that annoying anal) need to preserve food that might go to waste, even when I know I will probably never use it. Because "back in the day" every morsel, every saved penny, counted.


Keep this in mind when you read my recipes. I may occasionally urge you to preserve and save any extra ingredients or portions you may have. I'll write wacky things like “Blanching and packing veggies for the fridge need not be time-consuming!” Or, “Pickling those extra two cups of fresh jalapenos while you're juggling all these other cooking steps is a breezing. Just do it! It'll take no more time than it takes for picking juice to boil!” Follow my advice or not, but do forgive me, dear reader, for being the 1930s-throwback nutcase that I am. I came by it honestly.

Preserving Small Portions

Last weekend, as I was cooking away, chopping, dicing, saute-ing and roux-ing my way toward Rabbit & Andouille Gumbo, I set up a pot of boiling water to dip the fresh tomatoes in, to make it easier to remove the skins before chopping. You might remember that photo, which was particularly boring. It looked like this:

For most people, taking the skin off tomatoes is a big enough complication, but for me, it was just the beginning. Once those tomatoes had taken their individual dunks into the rolling boil, after they'd been relieved of their skins, chopped up, and tossed into the gumbo, I continued to let that original pot of water boil on the back burner. I blanched other veggies for the freezer, like this single portion of green beans (blanch for 3 minutes, pluck from the boiling water with a large slotted spoon and dump into ice water)...

And this single cob of corn broken in half (7 minutes to blanch, then into the ice bath they go)...

And, yes, I really did pickle all those jalapenos while the gumbo simmered.

Pickled Peppers On The Fly Recipe

Fill a clean canning jar with sliced raw jalapenos. Add a teaspoon of kosher salt, 2 whole cloves (or more) of garlic, 1 bay leaf, and if you like, a teaspoon of dried coriander seeds to the jar.  In a small sauce pan, heat 2 parts cider vinegar and 1 part water to a boil. Pour the boiling pickling water into the jar to fill within ½ inch of the lip. Cover the jar with the lid and screw it on tight, and store in the fridge. Leave the jar there for 2-3 days before opening it. Pickled peppers will keep in the fridge for up to 6 months.

So there you have it, the surplus fruit of my niggling frugality bug: One serving of corn on the cob, one serving of string beans, and a pint of pickled peppers: