The season everything failed produced one plate of food in September that I still think about. I have spent two years trying to work out whether it was actually that good or whether scarcity did the cooking.
A bag of liquefied cucumbers in the back of the crisper drawer forced me to admit that my glut problem was never a storage problem. It was a planting problem, and then a cooking problem.
I spent two seasons cooking my best vegetables into submission, making elaborate dishes to justify the effort of growing them. The ratatouille and the pureed carrot soup taught me that the plain version was usually the better one.
An eggplant I left on the plant nine days too long taught me that picking early and picking late are two completely different mistakes, and only one of them is recoverable at the stove.
I set my own carrots against supermarket carrots at the kitchen table and lost. Here is my honest accounting of where growing my own makes a real difference at dinner and where it makes none at all.
For years I wrote the meal plan at the kitchen table and then went shopping to fill the gaps. Moving that fifteen minutes outside, with coffee and an envelope, cut my waste more than any storage trick did.