Processing Mid-summer gluts

I try hard to avoid gluts. It was always a goal even in rural homesteading with lots of room, but I’m even more motivated now in suburbia, where every glut is using space that could have been saving a trip to the supermarket.

So lets not call them gluts yet. Most are still in the realm of peak season crops, that just need some processing to be fully appreciated.

She says.

With a Pollyanna grin.

I’ve given away big hands of bananas to all the neighbours, but there’s another bunch needing cutting soon, and still a good 100 or so of this bunch to get through. Today I’m making:

• Banana bread – using this recipe – some for eating over the next few days, some for giving to the neighbours, and some for the freezer for school lunch boxes when school goes back. Banana bread freezes well.
• Banana icecream – just ripe bananas blended smooth in the food processor and frozen. If I thaw them just for ten minutes then put them back through the food processor, they make lovely creamy icecream for cones – a perfect after school snack for grandkids and neighbour kids.

The Davidson’s plums are ripening, a bowlful a week. I’ve been eating a couple of them each day fresh, sugared overnight, on my yoghurt in the morning. I’m not even going to bother with Davidson’s Plum sauce – I still have jars of tamarillo sauce on the shelf. Today I’m making these into:

• Davidson’s plum jam – using this recipe. I’m making a couple of jars at a time, several times a week at the moment as the plums ripen. It’s very quick, much quicker than most jams. It will set in just a few minutes of boiling. The full jars will all be gifts and it’s hard to get to glut quantity of Davidson’s plum jam for gifts. But there’s always a part jar no matter how well I estimate the sizes of jars needed. We really don’t need to be eating jam but it’s so good.

The grapes come from my daughter’s place. The real value of the vine is for the leaves, for making dolmades and Greek yoghurt pies which we’ve been doing all spring. But this has been a bumper year for grapes too. I’m making:

• Schiacciata with grapes and rosemary oil – following this recipe, but with grapes rather than figs.
• Verjuice – which I’ve never made before, but here goes.
• Mosto cotto – in the big slow cooker, following this recipe
• Raisins – in the dehydrator
• Pickled grapes – another first, but a friend tells me that it is just an ordinary fridge pickle brine recipe, perhaps a bit sweeter than for carrots, and the result is gorgeous on a cheese platter or just for snacking. I have some experimental apple scrap vinegar, from the cores from our Anna apples, that turned out very well, so I might use that.

I’m picking a basket full of Madagascar beans every few days at the moment.

• Cooked Madagascar beans, in the small slow cooker, for all the many Madagascar bean recipes.
• Dried Madagascar beans for the jar – I’m onto the third big pantry jar full now, and still a few more picks to go, but it will take more that four big jars to be a glut of them.

The cucumbers and the tromboncino are genuine gluts. I have one overwintered tromboncino vine from last year, and two new planted this year, and still we are eating trombies every meal and giving them away till the neighbours are over them too. I have a repertoire of zucchini recipes that I use for trombies, but still they get ahead of me. I planted Poinsett cucumbers early in the season, then my Richmond River seeds arrived, and the Richmond River are so much nicer. We eat cucumber raita as a side dish often, and cucumber is always a main ingredient in summer salads, Greek or Asian. I don’t love pickled cucumbers but I know many people do, so I’ll make a few jars to get rid of the Poinsetts.

• Pickled tromboncino – using this recipe – these aren’t a real pickle, more of a marinate, but it turns tromboncino into something that goes really well on a sandwich or toast or a cracker, which gives a whole lot more options for using it. I have an eggplant and some capsicum I can add to them but they aren’t in glut proportions yet, so I’ll use mostly trombies.
• Pickled cucumbers – using the bread and butter cucumber recipe from my Eden Creek Preschool recipe book. It’s a book of handwritten recipes, copied on the school photocopier, made as a fundraiser when the daughter, mentioned above, was in preschool. One of my treasures.

I don’t mind full day in the kitchen every so often if the product is worth it.