In August, after a half hour spent picking vegetables in our garden, I thought, "Why not take a canning/preserving class?"

I knew my friend Kirsten would be game, so I recruited her for the adventure.

[Kirsten designs beautiful eco-jewelry; see her work at kirstenmuensterjewelry.com]

I’d found out about this wonderful place called the Studio for Urban Projects (studioforurbanprojects.org) in San Francisco’s Mission District. Created by a group of four artists and architects, the Studio offers lectures, screenings, classes and even workshops for kids on fun things like magnetic fields and shelter-building. Over the summer, the Studio offered a series of classes under the rubric of "Self-Sufficient Kitchen," which included days devoted to cheese, bread, fermentation and, of course, canning/preserving.

Kirsten and I arrived, along with about 10 others, and were served lovely herbal tea. We were soon on our way to transforming beautiful sun-ripened summer produce into something entirely different for the cooler months ahead….

The kitchen at the Studio for Urban Projects.

The well-stocked shelves.  

Spices including pepper flakes, fennel, cinnamon and mustard seed.

The class was taught by the adorable Nicole LoBue, who studied at Annemarie Colbins’ Natural Gourmet Institute and the French Culinary Institute in New York.

That’s her at the beginning of the class before we got to work hulling strawberries, dicing onions and cauliflower, and boiling all sorts of alchemic combinations including blackberry jam, tomatoes in basil and preserved lemons. For the next four hours we were engaged in an intense afternoon of chopping, measuring, packing and boiling.

You can’t rush the process of canning and preserving. So this day was a lot about patience. And waiting. Where cooking can happen a little more on the fly, this old-fashioned art is more like baking in that it requires intense focus and attention. You are, after all, dealing with precise measurements—and scalding hot jars. I like canning/preserving for the same reasons I enjoy simple tasks like shelling peas or peeling potatoes. These are the rare moments when I seem able to tune out all the quotidian concerns of the day (When is my next story due? Did I pay the gas bill?) and focus almost meditatively on what’s in front of me. Multitasking is out of the question.

Everything we were producing was so incredibly beautiful that it was nearly impossible not to sneak a taste here and there. Kirsten, who is an even bigger ice cream fanatic than I am, joked, along with a few other attendees, that we should forget the canning and just dash to Bi-Rite Creamery (biritecreamery.com) around the corner for a few hand-packed pints. The strawberries in sherry (bubbling below) were practically begging for that fate. But we resisted.

An attentive student (that’s me in the black dress on the left), I have already made my first very tiny batch of peach preserves, and Kirsten and I are planning to schedule a full day of production soon. It doesn’t really solve the problem of what I’m going to do with my zucchini surplus, but when supplies for my near-daily heirloom tomato salad run out, I’ll be so thankful to have “put up” a stash for the tomato-less winter.

Some books that were heartily recommended by Nicole include Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Fruit (powells.com/biblio/0060199571) and the Ball Blue Book of Preserving (amazon.com/ball-blue-book-of-preserving/dp/0972753702).