Let’s take a step back from preservation and talk about one of the most important aspects of the garden. And that’s efficiently using up your produce, fresh!
One of the things we have up our sleeves is a range of recipes that are focused on specific produce. The goal of these recipes is to help us put at least a small dent in the fresh food we’re producing, when it’s in season. They primarily focus on a single type of produce and when we find great recipes, we keep them around for years to come.
For example, this delicious cucumber salad will burn through five or six cucumbers in one sitting. And it’s so dang good you could practically eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner! It has everything. Sweet, salty, sour, umami and best of all, a super fresh summer taste that just makes our mouths happy. It’s good for you and you won’t feel guilty about devouring it (which I always do!), since the whole darn thing is like a hundred calories or so. (And we’ll of course put the recipe down in the comments!)
Another example is we’re having sausage stuffed zucchini for dinner tonight. This will evaporate a few squash, something we desperately need at this point. But, instead of it being a very “veggie forward” kind of dish, it’s meaty and flavorful, something you really want to sink your teeth into. We have many examples like this, surrounding the foods we produce.
Now, the collection of these recipes aren’t something that happens overnight. But, we encourage our readers to think this way about their cooking while the garden is producing. Centering your dishes around using up specific produce, when it’s in season, is something that will help you significantly increase the efficiency and value of your garden.
One of the reasons that we “garden hard” is because our produce selection, especially over the winter, is quite dismal. Fresh food, put on a barge for a couple thousand miles and brought into a frozen world, has its fair share of problems. It’s very important to us to “eat fresh,” especially while our garden is producing at scale.
Preservation has its place. But, we encourage our readers to focus on the fresh food they are producing, too. Freshly harvested food is the most nutritious you can get, providing us with the maximum amount of “good stuff” possible from food!
We hope you enjoy this recipe! We’ve shared it before, but it’s solidly in our top 5 summer produce recipes and we make it quite frequently while our cucumbers are pumping!
