Suffering Sea-Sun-al Stress Syndrome

Dear Tamar:

Help! I love summer as much as the next guy, but the fruits and vegetables are already getting the best of me. I go crazy taking my kids strawberry picking. But after a pie or two, I’m kind of out of steam—except then it’s cherry time. Then, it’s blueberry season. I’m seeing boxes of cucumbers at farm stands—should I be making pickles?? Am I canning my own tomatoes? Where does the energy come from? Which ones are worth it? I’m getting sea-sun-al stress!

-Sea-Sun-al Stress Case

Dear Sea-Sun-al Stress,

In the 90s, there was an SNL skit called Ruining it For Everyone. It was a panel of the protagonists of cautionary tales behind conventions like: “Check your Halloween Candy for Razor blades,” “Don’t Pick up Hitchhikers,” and “Restroom for Customers Only.”

I think of the skit whenever I see super a specific rule—(“SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS ARE NOT FOR EATING”—at my son’s school). Who did something to inspire the teachers to write that, and in CAPS? I fantasize about it sometimes, picturing little Moon chewing on a frog’s leg, Levi dunking a delectable finger in formaldehyde…

I bring up the SNL skit because it makes me think of the skit’s corollary, acted out in my own life. I call it: I Did it So You Don’t Have to.

This is where I shuffle my own mistakes and missteps. I’m not so deluded as to think my son will learn from my mistakes. He’ll make his own. The list—which is very long; I’ve erred an unimaginable amount—is irrelevant in parenting. But I do keep tabs on the errors in hopes that other people, who aren’t related to me, might learn something from them.

Rather than list all the things I’ve done so you don’t have to, I’ll limit myself to errors dealing with food preservation. The three biggest mistakes have been: 1) Preserving everything that comes into season like some kind of deranged Laura Ingalls Wilder/Tradwife Zombie prepper. 2) Letting the lethargy of summer, plus memories of having overprepped, lull me into thinking I should just let each bumper crop pass me by, preserving none of it. 3) Figuring that while I’m preserving anything, I’d might as well do a ton of it, since the burners are already lit and the canning pot already rattling.

I’ll walk you through the pitfalls one by one. 1) There was a year, about six or so back, when I wondered whether I could preserve all the food we’d need in winter—or most of it at least. There were the predictable ones: tomatoes, corn, beans, chilies, jams. But then it got kind of weird: boiled kale, collards, etc, rung out well and squeezed into balls, then frozen. Combinations of herbs—cilantro and sweet onion, basil and garlic. Green tomato pickles and jam. Rose petal jelly. Pickled nasturtium buds. Sauerkraut. Enough popsicles for a preschool. The chest freezer filled. So did the upstairs freezer. Two years later, I had to chisel iceblocks of herb-filled Bell jars off one of their sides. I have never located the kale balls. 2) If you have any frontiersperson tendencies at all (and I can tell from the question that you do) it is really depressing to buy can after can after can of tomatoes, and bags of frozen corn, and so on, all winter long, remembering how ripe and beautiful and inexpensive they all were at the end of last summer. 3) One year my brother-in-law almost died pickling and canning three cases of chiles in my back yard—his stomach covered in welts from the chile seeds plus sun. During the pandemic, the writer Michael Specter almost met his end working through two bushels of corn with me. It’s not worth having tons of food put up if you’re dead.

If you were to avoid following my missteps, the remaining path suggests: only preserve the foods that you find yourself missing in the winter—or the ones you get depressed buying repeatedly at the grocer store—in small enough batches that no one almost dies. For my family, it’s frozen tomatoes—which my mother taught me, after I’d blanched and peeled a bushel last summer, you don’t have to peel; the peels come off when they thaw!—frozen corn, frozen beans, and pickled chiles; and jam my son signs off on, since he’s the main consumer of jam. In July, I buy no more than a half bushel of Kirby cucumbers and make new pickles. These take under a week to ferment, get stored in the fridge, and we make it through all of them before they get past half sour.

Dear cook, what’s right for me is not, of course, right for you. But taking careful stock of your own preferences is the part of my story you can copy. Do neither too much nor too little, and do it without killing anyone. You’ll find that the simple principle of moderation does much to relieve your sea-sun-al malaise.