Such bounty! The little pear tree (the one that Jane hacked to its knees earlier this spring in a rather exuberant pruning spree) is barely able to hold its branches up any more. When I work out in the vegetable boxes at the pear tree's feet I am pelted with falling fruit. I know this should elicit some clever 'ah... gravity' type of response, but instead I've been overwhelmed with panic. What are we going to do with all this fruit?
I've put in a request from the Life Cycles fruit-pickers to come out and harvest away, but the website indicates they are also overwhelmed - with way too many cries for help from panicky fruit tree owners.
Meanwhile, I gathered as many pears as I could carry and decided to try my hand at drying them... The oven is now full of pear bits. The irony of picking fruit from my backyard (oh, so very, very green of me) and attempting to preserve the spoils (also very noble) in an electric oven (12 hours, even at such a low temperature is not so very green) does not elude me. And so, I now begin my search for a solar-powered dehydrator. Surely such a thing must exist?
I must say that in the quest for information about preserving all things edible, The Big Book of Preserving the Harvest by Carol W. Costenbader is excellent, even if it doesn't specify whether I need to slice the pears before or after steam blanching.
Hey, before I started slicing up pears this morning, I had never even heard of steam blanching.
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