Pictures of Cedar Market 2012

Opening day….what great atmosphere! I love this market and will probably be doing it regularly. Wide array of homemade and homegrown food and art. Music playing and old friends catching up.

Enjoy the pictures!

Cedar Market Singers

Cedar Market Opening Day

Ladies doing Tai Chi at Cedar Market

I Was Born a Baby Boomer

I was born a baby boomer. I grew up with parents and grandparents who lived through at least one war.  Thrift and preparedness were unspoken beliefs guiding every monetary decision. A good portion of my summers were spent helping my grandparents or parents tend a large garden and greenhouse interspersed with sporadic bouts of preserving. Nothing edible was wasted, no patch of soil left empty.

My favourite place in our garden was the pea patch. Many a morning mom would be hollering at me from my sister’s bedroom window to stop eating the peas. I could never understand why she was so vehement about eating them cooked rather than raw. I hid in between the giant rows of soft green vines, sitting on the neatly tended path looking for hidden gems, the peas whose shell was still soft enough to eat. Dad only grew shelling peas and the pods would get tough and inedible as the seed inside ripened. Thing is, I loved the taste of the pod. It was like a sweetened version of the pea itself and I had discovered the pea’s secret. There was a critical period in the pea’s growth where the pod had not yet formed its fibrous protective covering. I could eat pod and pea together. The pea seeds were small and tender and the combining of both pod and pea in a single bite was gastronomic heaven.

My mom and my reasons for canning and preserving food are radically different. Mom preserved food out of necessity and fear. Post war fear of more rations and shortages and necessity because in the middle of winter frozen peas, blackberry jelly, canned pears and tomato sauce may not have been available and/or were too expensive. I put food up because I want my family to consume food grown close to home, even in the winter. I don’t need to, I can go to the grocery store and find all forms of vegetables and fruit preserved and fresh at prices I can afford. But I don’t know where it was grown, whose and how many hands touched it, how long its been sitting on the shelf and what’s been put on it or in it pre planting to post picking.

Dad always grew enough peas for mum to freeze. They wouldn’t come ready all at once so she’d be freezing peas for a couple of weeks. It was work intensive, peeling off the top, sliding your finger down the seam to split the pod open, then popping the peas out into a bowl. Sometimes you’d find a small white pea weevil, that pea would be thrown out, the rest in the pod could be saved.

When the bowl was full, mom would drop them in boiling water for a few seconds to blanch them. I never understood why she had to do that until I tried freezing them myself, without blanching. Fortunately, I only froze two bags. I knew something hadn’t worked when I pulled a bag out of the freezer and the peas looked pale. When steamed they were hard and had no flavour. Blanching deactivates enzymes that make certain foods lose flavour and colour and turn tough. Mum’s frozen veggies always tasted of summer: fresh and sweet. Dad used to say it was because her spit was sweet. For years, I believed him.

My mother and grandmother did food preservation very well. Mom could turn any vegetable from the garden into an amazing and exotic chutney, relish or jam. Nannie turned green tomato relish into an artistic rendering of everything left over at the end of the season.

Though neither mom nor nanny formally instructed me in the intricacies of putting up food, I now am fully immersed in its culture. I mean I am hooked, passionate, even zealous about lining my shelves with jars of all sizes, filled with the bounty from my garden.

Preserving food is addictive. I have two rooms filled with jars of colourful jams, jellies, salsas, and more. Our family could survive an emergency for at least six months living off my preserved food. My favourites are canned pears and peaches. John’s is salsa. The kids like any of my jams, but their favourite is blackberry.

Both our kids grew up grazing in our garden. Both have worked on a farm for the summer. When Megan comes home on weekends, she’ll go out to the farm to work…just for fun. My hope is that she’ll have the same passion and understanding of food preservation. In my generation we put food up because we could, in her’s it may just be that they preserve food because they have no choice!