More and more of us face an uphill struggle to keep our families well fed and properly nourished with tasty — chemical-free, where possible — food. While still throwing in delectable treats every now and then.

One excellent way of helping balance the cookbooks is to indulge yourself in the fascinating art of preserving seasonal vegetables, fruit and herbs. Buying them when prices are down and preserving them, in all sorts of different ways, for year-round use.

As with so many other things in life, ‘commercial interests’ sneakily promote home preserving as something that requires lots of expertise and expensive gizmos, but this is blatantly untrue. Stainless steel, enamelled or ceramic pans and trays, stainless steel or wooden spoons and ladles, recycled jars and bottles with resealable lids (not screwcaps), wooden chopping boards, various lengths of muslin or fine cotton cloth for a variety of uses, together with salt water and sunshine for sterilising solutions, and you are on your way.

Preserving is a great way to make the most of fresh fruits and vegetables

The obvious shortcut of washing, chopping, bagging up and throwing in to the freezer is, of course, an option. However, with load-shedding and electricity breakdowns being par for the course and both generators and fuel to run them being very expensive for majority of the people, it is wise to preserve in an ‘electric free’ way.

Take, for example, the recent panic when the price of tomatoes hit 400 rupees per kilo. As a result, kitchens across the country ground to a horrified halt except for the kitchens of very few far-sighted people who had either preserved the tomatoes they bought in bulk from the bazaar when prices were at rock bottom, or of those hard working gardeners who had grown and preserved their own.

Tomatoes are, in fact, one of the simplest fruits — yes tomatoes are a fruit not a vegetable — to preserve. They can be plain bottled, bottled in the guise of plain tomato sauce for use in a wide variety of dishes, or be conjured in to chilli garlic sauce, ginger/garlic sauce, imli ginger/garlic sauce, basil and tomato sauce, mixed herb sauce, tomato and onion, tomato and capsicum, tomato and apple, tomato and just about any other fruit-vegetable-and-herb-mix-you-fancy sauce. Or, they can be sun-dried (or dried in a special dehydrator: a piece of equipment worth investing in if humidity tends to be too high for successful sun-drying in your particular locality) before being stored in sterilised glass jars, in jars of good quality olive oil — Pakistani olive oil, now that we are producing it — to be served up with salads or added to pasta dishes for an otherwise unaffordable luxury. The sun-dried tomato pieces can be put through a grinder to make the strongest, tastiest, tomato powder you can imagine — magic powder that has endless uses and which can, in sterilised, airtight jars, be kept for years.

Tomatoes can also be made in to a mouth-watering selection of chutneys and relishes and, disgusting at it may sound to the uninitiated, tomato jam!

Geographically speaking, Pakistan is blessed with a wide range of climates and soil conditions; this combination allows us to produce an astonishingly wide range of crops throughout the year. This diversity means that, wherever you happen to reside, there is always something in season, therefore always something or other available at a reasonable cost, which is where preserving kicks in.

Fruits for preserving are many and include tomatoes, capsicums, aubergines, chillies, apples, oranges, lemons, apricots, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries grapefruit, peaches, black currants, red currants, white currants, gooseberries, mangoes, nectarines, pears, cherries, loquat, strawberries, plums, pomegranates, figs, bananas, kiwi fruit, pineapples, grapes, guavas, melon, watermelon, cactus figs (this being the fruit of the ‘Opuntia’ cactus) and just about any other fruit you can think of.

Vegetables for preserving include peas, beans, onions, carrots, cabbage, red cabbage, kale, cauliflower, turnips, radish (mooli), cucumber, zucchini, pumpkin, loki, tinda, garlic, ginger, sweet corn, leaf beet/Swiss chard and beetroot.

Most culinary herbs and some edible flowers can be dried for use in cooking and in herbal teas.

In a month’s time, we will delve into further preserving details, accompanied by recipes for you to enjoy.

Published in Dawn, EOS, January 5th, 2020