What I’m preserving in August – it’s all about tomatoes!

August has arrived, and the preserving season is now in full swing.

At this point in summer, preserving is no longer something I plan to do.

Making sauce

There are vegetables coming into the kitchen almost every day, jars are slowly filling the pantry shelves, the dehydrator is running, and every time I think I have caught up, I walk outside and find something else ready to harvest.

And this month, it is all about tomatoes.

I'm making tomato sauce, another batch of garden salsa, dehydrating peppers and mushrooms, and trying to keep up with what appears to be an endless stream of zucchini.

Welcome to August!

Tomatoes, tomatoes and more tomatoes

This is the moment I've been waiting for.

After months of sowing, potting on, planting, watering and generally obsessing over tomato plants, August is when all that work finally starts arriving in the kitchen.

And when tomatoes arrive, they don't politely come one at a time.

Suddenly there are bowls of them.

This month, a lot of those tomatoes are becoming tomato sauce for the pantry.

Tomato sauce is one of those things I can never really have too much of. During the rest of the year it disappears into pasta sauces, soups, stews, casseroles and quick dinners, so putting away plenty while tomatoes are abundant makes perfect sense.

There is also something incredibly satisfying about taking a huge pile of tomatoes from the garden and turning it into rows of jars.

The volume reduces dramatically, which always feels slightly insulting after all the work that went into growing them!

But those jars are basically concentrated summer.

Opening one in the middle of winter and knowing that the tomatoes grew just outside our house makes all the work worthwhile.

More garden salsa

I'm also making more garden salsa.

Because apparently there is no such thing as enough salsa.

This has quickly become one of my favourite things to preserve because so much of it can come directly from the garden. Tomatoes, peppers and onions all come together in one jar, turning several different harvests into something we will actually use throughout the year.

And salsa doesn't exactly struggle to get eaten in this house.

Open a jar. Find tortilla chips. Done.

Every time I look at the jars already sitting in the pantry, there is a temptation to think,

surely that's enough?

No.

Future me will absolutely disagree.

So another batch it is.

The dehydrator is working overtime

Evening chopping station

Not everything coming out of the garden needs to end up in a canning jar.

The dehydrator is also earning its keep this month, particularly with peppers.

Dehydrating is one of my favourite ways of preserving smaller harvests because an almost ridiculous amount of fresh produce can be reduced to something that takes up hardly any pantry space.

Dehydrating time!

Some of the peppers will stay as dried pieces for cooking, while others can be ground into homemade pepper powder.

It's such a simple process, but making seasoning from peppers you've grown yourself still feels strangely impressive.

Grow peppers.

Dry peppers.

Grind peppers.

Stand back and admire your tiny jar as though you've invented paprika.

Mushrooms for the pantry

I'm dehydrating mushrooms as well.

These aren't coming from the garden, but they're such a useful ingredient to have stored that when I have the opportunity to preserve some, I do.

Dried mushrooms take up very little room and can later be rehydrated for sauces, soups and stews.

They can also be ground into mushroom powder, which is fantastic for adding a deeper savoury flavour to all sorts of dishes.

Between the tomatoes being processed and the dehydrator humming away, the kitchen is definitely starting to feel like preserving headquarters again.

Love to have dehydrated mushrooms on hand!

And then there are the zucchini...

Oh, zucchini.

Every gardener knows exactly where this is going.

The first zucchini of the season is exciting.

You inspect it every day.

You proudly carry it into the kitchen.

You carefully decide what you're going to make with it.

Then August arrives.

Suddenly there are three zucchini on the kitchen counter.

Then six.

You pick everything that looks remotely ready and congratulate yourself on finally being caught up.

The following morning there are seven more.

And there is always one hiding underneath a leaf that somehow manages to go from finger-sized to the dimensions of a small submarine in approximately 14 minutes.

At this point, zucchini isn't really a harvest.

It's an endless stream.

We're eating them fresh, finding ways to preserve them, giving them away and generally trying to stay one step ahead of the plants.

I'm not sure we're winning.

This is why I preserve

This is probably my favourite thing about preserving food from the garden.

A vegetable garden doesn't produce exactly the amount you need exactly when you need it.

It produces nothing.

Then a little.

Then a bit more.

And then suddenly:

EVERYTHING IS READY!

Without preserving, we'd either have to eat an unreasonable amount of the same vegetable every day or watch some of that hard-earned harvest go to waste.

Instead, August can feed us months from now.

Today's tomatoes become winter tomato sauce.

Peppers become dried seasoning.

Mushrooms sit quietly in the pantry waiting for a future stew.

Garden vegetables become jars of salsa we'll open long after the tomato plants themselves are gone.

Even the zucchini will somehow be dealt with.

Probably.

Watching the pantry fill up

This is one of my favourite times of year.

The garden might be looking a little tired after months of Spanish summer heat, but inside the house the results of all that work are becoming increasingly visible.

The pantry shelves are filling again.

Every new jar represents something we grew or preserved ourselves. Every container of dehydrated food is another ingredient stored away for later.

There is still plenty more preserving to come, but August is when it really starts to feel substantial.

For now, though, it's tomatoes.

Lots and lots of tomatoes.

Tomato sauce is going into jars. Another batch of garden salsa is being made. Peppers and mushrooms are disappearing into the dehydrator.

And somewhere outside, while I'm writing this, another zucchini is almost certainly plotting against me...