If you are like me, then you tend to bring home baskets full of produce when the two of you can only eat an armful at most. But it’s so pretty! It’s red and shiny! This entire bushel is flawless, we must buy! It smells so good, I can’t leave without 3 pounds! Perhaps you have said this too? Convincing yourself your better half that the 5 different varieties of tomatoes were absolutely necessary, and that you could not survive without them. Yes, that is where I live in summer. The farmer’s market, the produce section at Whole Foods, the produce stands on the side of rural roads. Just smelling the sweet earthiness of produce sends me into a tizzy sometimes, and well, when your budget is suddenly threatened because, hey, I decided we needed $50 worth of cherries today means you may find yourself on the other end of a harsh look, or disapproving head shake from the man taking care of the bills.

Even with the constant whining explanations of we only get this for 3 months, and then nothing! Just boring squash and collards and dried out peppers until next summer, we must eat now! doesn’t mean he will actually then applaud you for bringing home the overwhelming bounty you seem to haul in every week. So, in order to make it more cost effective, to make the summer’s best stay with us until next summer, and so we don’t get produce lust every June because we have been without it for far too long, we freeze. We freeze our produce booty and eat it all year long until next summer, when we can stock up a little more, without over killing it because hey, I’ve had great blackberries during February so it’s not as much of a shock when I see their delicious black beaded balls sitting in front of me in June.

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I must admit, for being all “organic/local/don’t buy anything store bought” I never had any problems throwing a container of stock in my cart. It was easy and fast and, really, can you actually taste a difference? Well, after a recent endeavor to be more thrifty in the kitchen I couldn’t bare to think of wasting a perfectly good chicken carcass on the trash — which means raccoons and all sorts of nightly creatures in my part of town. So, I made stock, and I must confess, I have been planted back on the path of “everything should be homemade” — it does make a difference.

Despite my ignorance of what actually goes in stock I looked up recipes — and there are a ton out there. But what I had to come to realize was that you don’t actually need a recipe. Stock should not be something you go buy chicken and vegetables for so that you can boil the heck outta them just so you can use “the yellow juice”. If you have chicken, save the bones. If you have a spare carrot or two, save them — freeze them. Until eventually you have ingredients for stock.

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Because I like doing this the hard way, because I am not satisfied with the canned pureed pumpkins, and because I’m me, I decided to make pumpkin puree. It was a long, arduous journey going from small cutesy pumpkin to pureed mash, my hands screaming in agony from chopping and slicing virtually impenetrable walls of pumpkin. The thought of how long the canned variety sits on the super market’s shelf every year waiting for Thanksgiving season to bring in hoards of grabby pumpkin mongers to descend upon it’s easy, simple, uncomplicated addition to recipes was alarming. Can you really justify the purchase of years old pumpkin puree when you can bring home bag-fulls of pumpkins for next to nothing? One batch of fresh puree was all it took to help me realize, those cans are a life-saver.  It took an incredible amount of strength and time to make this, but for those like me here are the steps to your own battle with the gourd:

Remove the top section of the pumpkin* and scoop out the seedy, stringy center reserving these for something yummy.

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There are about as many techniques for hard-boiling eggs as there are recipes for them. I use the American’s Test Kitchen’s fool-proof method which I have found to be, indeed, fool-proof. The recipe can easily be doubled or tripled as long as you use a pot large enough to hold the eggs in a single layer, covered by an inch of water.

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Artichokes can be scary. But that’s why I’m here, to take the scary out of scary. Er, never mind. Really, I needed some artichokes and I couldn’t justify buying canned artichoke hearts when fresh ones are bursting through the produce section. So I gulped, took a big breath, squeezed my eyes shut and reluctantly bought a few artichokes. And it’s true,  there is a lot of waste when it comes to fresh artichokes, and a lot of prep work. We just have to accept it and move on, because fresh food is always better than canned or frozen food.

There are a few things you should know before getting into the dirty business of de-choking and artichoke. These babies turn brown faster than you can blink. If you are needing artichokes for a salad or something where their green color is pivotal to your presentation, then you will want to have some lemons on hand. Just like when preparing apples and avocados, rub the juice from a lemon wedge over your artichoke as you work. You can also keep the parts of the artichoke you are not preparing submerged in lemon water to prevent the browning process.

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