COVID hits me pretty hard. This is the second time I’ve had it (both times involved trips to New Mexico, too, hmmm), and both times it’s been this month-long thing. I’m over the fever and other acute symptoms and now just have to suffer through this unrelenting fatigue and brain fog for, I don’t know, maybe another week or two. I’m sleeping about 12 hours a day, which is very unlike me and unsettling to me, and still not ever feeling like I’ve had enough sleep, which is also unsettling.
But, as I mentioned before, I ordered some end-of-season vegetables from a farm, before I knew I would be sick, and all the while I was in New Mexico, too, Chris was dutifully harvesting our tomatoes and sticking them in the freezer. We accumulated 35 pounds of frozen tomatoes that way, and I had also bought a 20-pound box from the farm, and we still have a large bag of hot peppers and now apples are starting to pile up.1 So I need to use most of the little energy I have right now to work slowly through the mountains of veg, to keep moving it from the “highly perishable, in danger of going bad” to the “can be safely stored for a long time” pile.
Yesterday Chris ran those 55 pounds of tomatoes through the Squeezo, and today I’m trying to deal with all this sauce.
I finally made myself cut up the onions and peppers and garlic to get a batch of spaghetti sauce cooking. Currently it is on the stove, boiling, condensing into a thick sauce from the relatively watery tomato puree it started out as. The frozen tomatoes produced a more watery puree than the fresh ones do, so it’s taking a little extra time, but it tastes good, and I will have extra sauce from this available for dinner tonight as well: win-win.
Then I have about 10 more quarts (or liters, if you prefer) of sauce left. I’ll make a Hyderabadi style chutney and freeze that.2 Then I’ll have enough left over to make a big batch of meatballs to can in tomato sauce and a batch of beans (2 pounds of dried beans) to can in tomato sauce. I think after that I will still have more sauce to use up, and it will certainly become some variety of hot sauce. Making razorback sauce, for example, which is a sweet hot sauce, would use up a bunch of the cherry peppers I have languishing in the refrigerator, in addition to using up the tomato puree, which would be a huge help. I just have to somehow find the energy to deal with the cherry peppers to do that.
I know a lot of canners only can elemental ingredients. A lot of people would just can the tomato sauce and then later on you can always use it to cook beans or meatballs or anything you want! I understand the logic, but, as I’ve said before, part of what I want to get out of my canning is easy meals later on; if the beans or meatballs are already made and waiting for use, then I have bought myself a few easy lunches or dinners. Another reason that I make hot sauce and spaghetti sauce now, though, is also that I have the fresh peppers now, and I won’t later on. Later on, I could make these things out of frozen or dried peppers, perhaps, but if I know that we’ll eat spaghetti sauce and hot sauce (and we will), then I don’t find it much more work to process the vegetables as combined foods than I do to process each of them separately.
But I have to admit I’m feeling a little oppressed by vegetables right now. I barely have energy for anything, and I have to spend it on cutting up onions! How very dull! I think I always feel a little bit of this as the canning season winds down — why can’t it just end already! I am begging for the frosts to come, the vegetables to stop ripening, for there to be time for other things. I think I always feel this way, but this year the frosts are later than normal, so the garden really is lasting for longer than normal, and the feeling is exacerbated by my fatigue this year.
When I get like this, where I haven’t been able to cook enthusiastically for some time, I often find comfort in reading cookbooks. My favorite cookbooks to read are ones with a lot of interesting and intricate recipes, like The Art of Escapism Cooking by Mandy Lee or Michel Richard’s wonderful Happy in the Kitchen. I start thinking about what my next big effort-cook is going to be, once I am well and the tomatoes and peppers are, at long last, all lined up neatly in the pantry. Thinking about making something new and weird and extraordinary gets me through the tiny drudgeries of getting the canning finished up or the daily cooking of whatever meals I can muster up the energy to make while I’m sick.
Last night as I was, once again, leafing through The Art of Escapism Cooking, I noticed the page that introduces the chapter on foods she eats when she is by herself, and it captures my feeling about liking to cook and not liking to cook at the same time so well:
… cooking and eating are two very different, entirely separate areas of investigation. Cooking, to me, is about curiosity, the insatiable need to know beyond necessity, the compulsion in the process of unwrapping a question, rephrasing it again, moving on to the next, the hunt.
Eating is about comfort.
I rarely find enthusiasm in repeating the same recipes, answering the same questions. But I can eat the same things over and over again.
This is exactly it, and why it’s troublesome that I, and all the people I cook for, want to eat the same things over and over again, that we are seeking comforts — and it’s also why I cook for my family, to provide those comforts. Cooking the same thing all the time is not exciting in the way that eating the same thing is, but I do cook what we want to eat, about 15 times per week.3
I only really like cooking when I get to make something far-out and fun. Sometimes it’s a labor-intensive baking project I want to do, something involving puff pastry from scratch or requiring several steps that have to be completed over a series of days. Sometimes it’s a snack buffet where I make a big variety of things, getting to figure out new and exciting flavor and texture combinations along the way. Eating these things feels less like comfort and more like luxury, although there’s a kind of comfort in occasional luxury, isn’t there?
Anyway, as with all things, this moment, too, will pass, and in a couple of weeks or so I’ll have my normal amount of energy back. I’ll forget how I felt right now, and I’ll be casually saying things like, “Hey, this weekend we should make cruffins!”4
I really like to have canned applesauce around, especially for when anyone is sick as it is such a comforting (and easily digestible) food. I would also like to have some more apple butter in our jam collection.
I don’t can this one because it doesn’t have added vinegar or lemon juice, so it would have to be pressure canned, and it isn’t worth it for this recipe.
One of the drawbacks of homeschooling and work from home that I don’t see people mention too much. On the one hand, we’re all eating good, nutritious food all the time. On the other hand, I cook more and more often than most people would want to. And I can’t say that I blame them.
Croissant muffins.