Whether you grow your own produce or buy it from a CSA or a farmer's market, you probably suffer from the same feast/famine cycle in terms of produce. In summer, you might have 39 zucchini, 50 pounds of tomatoes, and a fridge full of greens, but in winter you're lucky to have two wretched hothouse tomatoes that are worth using. What to do?

The most obvious way to smooth out this produce hump would be to preserve the food somehow, and many people do this, of course. I've noticed, however, that of the three most common methods for preserving food - drying, freezing, and canning - the last one tends to limp behind the others, particularly in the younger crowd. The reasons for this are obvious, perhaps. It takes lots of boiling water, jars, lids, and rings, and there are myriad rules and tables for how this or that should be canned so you don't poison your family. Freezing is by comparison fast and easy: buy a box of bags and get to work. Drying is easy, too, but not everything can be dried, and even if some fruit or vegetable can be dried, that doesn't mean you want tons of it.

Canning has a few advantages over its two peers. For one, you can put an enormous amount of food into very few jars, as you literally pack it in and remove any air. There's also the fact that some foods don't freeze well (salsa, for one, turns to water), and even if they do, if you want to eat in 15 minutes and haven't planned ahead, you've got an iceberg on your counter. Then there's freezer burn, which limits how long one should keep food in that state. Something few consider is the fact that freezers are energy-intensive appliances, doing what they do. As we learned after an intense ice storm last winter, they also don't do you much good when your power goes out for more than 24 hours.

One of the problems with canning is that it can be confusing, because everyone adds slight variations to the basic rules, and these variations lead to holy wars between generations sometimes. Traditional sources such as The Joy of Cooking (the old one, not the new Joy) are wonderful to read, but they make it sound like an arcane science, while general purpose cookbooks such as Better Homes and Gardens will get you pretty far, but don't handle exceptions or odd cases very well.

Fortunately, there are some very good websites where skilled canners and scientists share common-sense and straightforward information. If you buy anything made by Ball, you'll find the address www.freshpreserving.com somewhere on the box. Despite the pretty annoying Flash animation entry page, it's a decent site, but assumes that you want to use their spice packs and such. Not for me. If you search the Web for 'home canning,' the first result is typically www.homecanning.com, which will just lead you to the aforementioned site.

The best resource I've found is the National Center for Home Food Preservation, an agency created by the USDA's Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service. That's a fancy way of saying that it pulls together information from the various land-grant university research and extension services. What this means for the canner is that it's the latest research, presented in a neutral and endorsement-free environment. The publication section of their site offers clear choices based on what one is canning, as well as information on other food preservation methods, including freezing, fermentation, storing, curing, etc. I used "Guide 3, Selecting, Preparing, and Canning Tomatoes and Tomato Products" with great success today, and was glad to find a definitive answer to my questions about the need to acidify tomatoes, and how to do so.

The picture at the start of this post shows last night's canning project, okra pickles. Two years ago, I thought okra was the devil's food and wouldn't have eaten it other than in gumbo, where other flavors and textures dominate. I now realize I wasted many decades of my life with such silliness, and am committed to undoing that sin. I've never pickled anything, let alone okra, so this was an experiment. I have the remains that wouldn't fill the last jar in the fridge and sampled them today. Fantastic! If you're curious, the red color comes from the cayenne and red okra, which was about 30% of the mix.

I can hardly wait to crack some of my canned food in the depths of winter and enjoy my sun in a jar.