After breakfast, we headed to the farmers’ market and King Soopers and bought thirty pounds of tomatoes, eighteen pounds of peaches, broccoli, corn, carrots, and red peppers. The girls just love running through the fountain at Southlands, even though it was only about 75 degrees!

When we got home, Isabella and Mythili helped wash jars and peel the skins off of the tomatoes. I stemmed them and squished them into their jars–twelve in all–and then we sat down for a quick lunch while the water boiled for the peaches. I was about to smash those peaches against the wall, because they weren’t quite ripe and the skins didn’t slide off as easily as the tomatoes, forcing me to use the peeler where the juicy skins stick like glue. But I still managed to get them all in the jars, boil enough water to fill all twelve, and Bruce just now, seven hours after arriving home, pulled the last jars out of the canner.

In the meantime, the girls helped me shuck corn, and I cut up one of our multitude of garden squash for our squash casserole, mixing it in with ricotta and Parmesan cheeses, spices, and tomato sauce ( I just can’t get away from my favorite food in the world–tomato sauce!).

Why do I do this? I could spend my Saturdays lazing around the house, watching TV, reading a book, or just watching the girls play their endless imaginary games. But even though it’s time consuming and sometimes tedious, there is something quite extraordinary and beautiful about a storage room filled with brightly colored jars of jam, tomatoes, and peaches. There is something about showing my girls that food does have a season, a harvest, and there are ways to preserve our food, and our health, without shipping it from thousands of miles away. Between the jars we’ve canned this month and the twenty loaves of zucchini and carrot bread we have baked and frozen for holiday gifts, I hope that my girls have learned that food is not just something that magically appears in front of them at meal time: it’s grown, it’s steamed, it’s handled and cooked. It’s made for us to enjoy and cherish, just as we are made for it.