Getting creative to deal with glut of veggies, guilt

By 
Erin Schanen

Vegetable gardens come with a healthy serving of guilt, and while that may sound like a bitter harvest, I find that it can lead to a burst of creativity.

Surely I’m not the only gardener who plants the vegetable garden in a manner that is sometimes more aspirational than it is realistic. I plant more of one vegetable than I could ever use and try new vegetables that I rarely buy from the store but somehow think I’ll eat a bushel of from my own garden.

I also don’t can anything, something I am fairly certain would come as a disappointment to my ancestors who would never have considered growing a garden just to consume its bounty immediately after harvest. In addition to a fear of poisoning people by doing it wrong, canning on a small scale seems like it would have limited return on the time investment.

I do freeze a few things, and I enjoy making refrigerator pickles, but most everything else that doesn’t store well is enjoyed fresh or given away.

Which is why it makes little sense that I plant a lot of peppers every year. One can only eat so many peppers at a time, and my track record with pickled peppers is mixed, which is to say either tasteless or eye-watering hot.

And this year’s peppers are doing far better than ever before, which means that I’m looking at a glut of peppers and I need to find something to do with them quickly.

Sure, I could give them away, but a guilty conscience keeps telling me that I grew them and it’s up to me to find something worthwhile to do with them.

The answer, I think, is hot sauce, something I’ve never had any interest in making before. One of the pepper varieties I’m growing is Aji Rico, an All-American Selection winning variety that is described as having a “warm” heat level and a citrus flavor. Everything else I know about it comes from a bottle of hot sauce custom made for the launch of the hybrid pepper several years ago that I was given as a promotion.

So even though I’ve never made hot sauce, getting creative means I’ll give it a shot.

If I’m successful, my pepper-related guilt will be sufficiently assauged, but there’s plenty more where that came from. I overplanted leeks, which grew extremely well from seed sown indoors, so I’ve been looking for creative ways to use them before the guilt takes hold.

The same goes for the Swiss chard, which I admit to growing mostly because it’s pretty. I haven’t touched it yet, but my guilt will soon have it sauteeing with some garlic and olive oil, and ultimately I’ll remind myself that I actually sort of like it.

But anything is better than relegating produce to the compost bin. My guilt simply won’t allow vegetables to take a direct route from the garden to the compost, so if need be, I’ll just get creative. It might not taste great, but I’ll be guilt-free.

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