Many of us who grew up in Kentucky may have memories of going down into our grandparents' cellar to retrieve a jar of green beans, canned the previous summer. I know I do. I also remember the sinister hiss of the pressure cooker as my grandma went about the mysterious business of transforming summer's bounty into winter's sustenance. While it was a familiar sight, the activities themselves were foreign and mysterious. I never understood the alchemy that preserved food.
When I joined a farm share last year with Misty Meadows Farm, I thought about canning some of our surplus. I even bought a box of mason jars though I had no idea what to do with them. The only use they've gotten is as frou-frou serving dishes for watermelon soup and for green bean salad. I would have loved a city dweller's non-hippie guide to home food preservation (not that there's anything wrong with hippieness, but my heels get more wear than my Birks these days).
Luckily, Stone Soup Community Kitchen has stepped up this summer to offer Louisvillians a do-it-yourself guide to canning and food preservation. No worries if you don't even have so much as a random childhood memory of someone else canning, they'll show class attendees everything you need to know to save that cumper crop of whatever you received in abundance in your farm share -- or grew in your garden or picked up at the farmer's market.
Canning and preserving food can get you through those long winter months when the farmer's market sells not much more than eggs and you're sorely tempted to buy those out-of-season trucked-in tomatoes that we all know taste nothing like the real thing.
So join your fellow locavores at the Fb3 Food Development Kitchen at 624 E. Market St.this Saturday, August 8 at 2 p.m. RSVP first to Rae Strobel at joyfuljourneys@gmail.com or SteVon Edwards at stevoncfa@bellsouth.net.
