Vegetable
Garden Vegetable
GardenHome gardeners tend to become vegetable connoisseurs. When you grow your own vegetables, you can choose the best varieties for flavour, pick them at optimum maturity and eat them before they lose flavour or nutrients. The general rule is: the faster from garden to table, the better. The exceptions are sweet potatoes and winter squash — they are quite bland directly out of the garden — curing and some time in storage are necessary for them to be at their best. Though yours will be better than any you can buy because you will treat them right.
Peas, beans, corn, new potatoes, cantaloupe and tomatoes, directly from the garden, are clearly superior. But is there is any significant advantage in making a soup, stew or sauce from garden fresh ingredients, especially if it is to be frozen and eaten months later?
For example, which is better:
My vote is for (1) followed closely by (2) with (3) a distant third. Whether this will be true for you depends, in part, on your recipe. If it calls for tomato paste instead of tomatoes, there may not be any difference. My spaghetti sauce recipe calls for lots of tomatoes and my tomatoes are better than any commercial tomato because I choose my varieties for flavour and I don't pick them until they are ripe. Commercial tomatoes are chosen for shipping qualities and are picked before they are ripe (and they may have been refrigerated along the way — ugh).
Some commercial vegetables can hold their own in a comparison with garden vegetables. Sweet red peppers, for example. I have purchased supermarket peppers which were almost as good as the ones I grow. If I didn't find them an easy, troublefree crop, I wouldn't bother growing my own. Sweet red peppers are expensive, but if you try to justify gardening as a way to save money, you will soon discover you are better off getting a paper route and using your wages (plus the money you save on seeds and tools) to buy vegetables. You will have cash left over for Christmas shopping.
Cooking is another factor in deciding whether you should bother growing the ingredients of your favourite recipes . The longer your cooking time, the less it matters what ingredients you started with. Cooking sterilizes bacteria, releases some flavours, changes others, and generally makes food easier to digest. Lengthy cooking degrades many nutrients and affects flavour. Whether the changes in flavour, from long cooking, are desirable depends on what you are used to. But if you like garden fresh flavours then you will keep cooking to a minimum.
Even if you don't grow your own vegetables, there is a good argument for cooking large batches of your favourite recipes at the time of year that home gardeners are harvesting their crops. This is the time when produce from farmers markets is at its best and also when fresh produce is cheapest.
Recipes that have become staples for us depend on the ingredients for flavour, with just a modest contribution from spices, salt and pepper. These recipes may not be impressive at first, but they grow on you. In particular, our spaghetti sauce just gets polite comments the first time it is served to a guest. The same guest becomes more effusive each time spaghetti is on the menu. It is our favourite suppertime meal.
Our spaghetti sauce recipe calls for flour as a thickener. The practice of using flour and starch to thicken sauces has fallen into disrepute because thickeners are frequently used to disguise and stretch cheap ingredients. In our case, a thickener allows us to use an abundance of our best flavoured tomatoes and to keep cooking to a minimum. Without the thickener we would have to boil down the sauce with a consequent loss of flavour and nutrients.
We make substantial quantities of the following recipes each summer and fall. The recipes require a 64 cup pot. If you don't have a pot that big, you will have to scale the recipes down.
What these recipes have in common is that the main components are garden fresh ingredients and cooking is kept to a minimum. In the case of pesto paste, that means no cooking at all.
All of these recipes can be used as single dish meals. Not something that any self respecting gourmet would do, but it makes for simple meal preparation. And that could be the deciding factor in whether you eat in or out tonight. Serving recommendations for pesto are based on the assumption that this will be your whole meal (well, maybe a small salad on the side).