Every year gardeners and cooks preserve the bounty of summer by drying, freezing and canning produce. Some use the ones that came from a grandmother’s kitchen and others experiment with new flavors.

Here are a few recipes I have used for decades.

Eggplant Caviar

This recipe was in a Gourmet magazine in 1973. It calls for one-pound of eggplant so for every pound of eggplant you want to preserve, increase the other ingredients. There is no need to be precise. The more finely you chop the ingredients the less lumpy the spread will be. Large black skinned eggplant have to be peeled after baking. The long thin Asian eggplants do not have to be peeled. Just remove the stem and flower ends — they are pretty crunchy.

The four-ounce jelly jars and a 15-minute boiling water bath preserve Eggplant Caviar for gifts and personal use during the winter. (Hoopes Hardware in Muskogee, 682-0711, will order cases of the four-ounce jars - $7.49 a dozen.)

Directions

Bake 1 pound of eggplant at 400 degrees for one hour and cool.

In a skillet, sauté 1 medium onion in 3 tablespoons olive oil for eight minutes.

Stir in one-third cup minced green pepper and 2 small cloves garlic, minced.

Cook, stirring five minutes.

Peel and chop the eggplant, add the onion mixture, one-half cup peeled and chopped tomatoes. Add salt and pepper to suit your taste.

Cover and cook over low heat for one-hour. Remove the cover and cook 30 minutes until the mixture thickens into a spread.

Stir in 1 tablespoon lemon juice and a one-half teaspoon sugar. Taste and add more salt, lemon juice or sugar to suit your preference.