The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon October 13th, 2009

As the transition to winter begins, and I spend more time talking about _Independence Days_, I thought it would be a good time to encourage my readers to do a self-evaluation of their food security and basic preparedness for an emergency.

The truth is that even if you think you are perfectly secure, you probably aren’t.  All you have to do is think about recent occasions when regions had power outages or crises for weeks on end, and when a buffer of food and medical supplies, and evacuation plan and lots of warm blankets would have been welcome.  Think Kentucky ice storms, Northeast ice storms, Houston and New Orleans Hurricanes…honestly, we all know it could happen.

So I would advise everyone to take a little while and see what your situation is, and maybe set some new goals for the fall and winter to improve – we all have things we can improve on.  So here’s a little quiz.  All questions are true/false. 

True or false:

Water:

1. I have two weeks of stored water, including my water heater and rainbarrels (if rainbarrels, you need a filter as well).  Stored water should be a minimum 1 gallon per person per day (2 is much better), plus 1 quart for each pet.

2. I have a plan for getting water (if you have a well) if the power is out for an extended period.  This could be a well bucket, a manual pump, or another water reliable water source. I have tested and used this source, and know that it works and is reliable.

3. I have a way of filtering or treating contaminated water, should my city or well water become unsafe to drink.

4. I have some familiarity with my local water infrastructure – I know where it comes from, and my community has a plan to handle water emergencies, including extended power outages. 

5. If I don’t have a reliable water source and am relying on stored water, I have a supply of alcohol-based hand-sanitizer for cleaning and hygeine. 

6. I know how to set up a composting toilet and handle hygeine issues.  If I live in a densely populated area, I’m prepared to talk to my neighbors about this stuff to prevent the spread of disease

Food Storage:

1. I have several familiar recipes that my family likes for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks that I can make several times each from my food storage without any other ingredients. 

2. I have food storage to last *at least* 3 weeks?  3 months?  Six months or more?  My family could eat wholly from our pantry for this period, and, even if they didn’t love it, would enjoy the foods generally.

3. I have special foods for those who have special dietary needs in my family and among the people most likely to come to us in an emergency.  If these foods are different than our normal ones, I have used them, and know that everyone will and can eat them.

4. I have fresh foods in cool/cold storage or in the garden year ’round that allow for a diet including fresh vegetables and fruits to supplement dry, canned or other preserved foods.

5. My food storage includes a variety of staple grains and legumes, not just wheat.  I know how to cook and use these grains, and my family likes them and eats them regularly. 

6. If I rely on a freezer, I either use it only for supplementation, or have a backup plan for how to prevent food waste (throwing a big party, canning or preserving it) if the power is out. 

7. I have the tools to preserve and store foods that I grow, forage or purchase in bulk.

8. I have stored food for my pets and livestock.

9. If my family regularly consumes meat, dairy or eggs, I have the animals to reproduce this, stored equivalents or a family that is comfortable with doing without and a store of recipes to make sure they don’t miss it.

10. I have a store of vitamins and understand the basics of nutrition so that we can eat well from our pantry.

11. I take advantage of bulk purchasing, seasonal abundance and sales to expand my storage as much as I can.  I also take advantage (or direct those more in need to it) of free food, through foraging, gleaning, dumpster diving, etc…

12. I have a budget for food storage and preparedness, and I add a little to my storage every week (or whatever period you use) by preserving, purchasing or foraging.

Evacuation Plans:

1. My family has “grab and go” bags that include basic necessities to allow us to manage up to a few days in transit or a shelter if we must leave our home rapidly.  These include copies of important documents and photos, portable, easy to cook foods, medication, matches, water, hygeine items, a change of clothes, children’s needs. 

2. My family has an evacuation plan including a meet up spot, a plan for picking up children or elders from various sites, a family member who can take messages and coordinate communications if people are out of touch, and transportation security – ie, bicycles, or stabilized gas for the car, directions to likely locales, etc….

3. Everyone in the family knows what to do if we get separated.  Friends/family that we might evacuate to know we might arrive and are willing to help.

4. We have plans for pets and livestock should we need to evacuate.

Health:

1. We have multiple first-aid kits (Independence Days includes a comprehensive discussion of this) and know how to use them.  All adults and older children are competent to provide first aid, evaluate whether something needs more medical attention, and handle an emergency if medical attention isn’t immediately available.  Not only do I own the books, but I’ve actually read them .

2. I have a three week supply of any needed medication or a viable substitute that I have tried and that works.  I also have copies of all my prescriptions, including glasses. 

3. If we are quarantined, I have basic nursing skills and know how to care for a sick person, and to reduce risk of infection. 

4. I have the capacity to boil water and heat food, to prevent fires while using new tools, to keep warm or cool and handle basic hygeine issues even during an extended power outage.

Tribal issues:

1. I know which of my family/friends might come to us in a crisis.  I have made basic preparations to meet their needs in an emergency, at least for a short time.  I have enough food and clothing, and at least a sleeping bag or two to offer.

2. If I am anticipating children, parents or extended family to rely on me in the long term, I have made preparations for this in my food storage, medical storage and supply of other basic needs.  This includes covering special needs like diapers for infants, medications for elderly parents, etc…

3. I have sent people I love a letter saying “if you ever need to come here I would welcome you.”  The letter includes back-road directions and is designed to get them thinking about such an eventuality.

Community:

1. I am familiar with my local foodshed and watershed, and am working with others to expand it.

2. I am encouraging others to build up a reserve of food and medicine, and to find ways to meet other needs, at either the individual or communal level.

3. I can teach others the skills I’ve gained, and am willing to do so.

Ok, scoring: If you see a “false” that’s an indication that that’s a place to begin working.  How did you score?  Remember, if you have work to do (me too, trust me!), don’t panic – just do a little at a time.  It doesn’t take a lot of time to fill a bottle with water or pick up an extra package of bandaids and one of dried beans.  It all adds up over time.

-Sharon

• Food Storage
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Sharon October 8th, 2009

I have a secret to tell you all – some people think I’m a little wordy.  Shhhh…don’t tell anyone.  I have no idea why people think this – more particularly, my editor.  Just because I sent her a manuscript that was a few words (no more than 20K) over the contracted number…. some people.

Anyway, in editing down _Independence Days_, I had to take out a lot of the links in the back of the book – or rather, for a long time I made a page and promised that I’d actually do something about it eventually.  Well, the book is now out, and it says that you can go to my site so I finally put them up at the top of my site on the “Food Preservation and Storage Link Vault” page.

I haven’t tested all the links and I’m sure there are good ones I’m missing – please feel free to add them in comments, or to email me using the contact form or at jewishfarmer@gmail.com if you notice a broken link or have a good reference for me to include.  And I hope this helps!

Sharon

• Food Storage , books
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Sharon June 16th, 2009

Yes, I know it is late June, and the quiet season for most communities in terms of holidays.  And yet, I think it bears talking and thinking about – that we should be thinking now about preparing so that we can engage in basic celebrations of whatever feasts and festivals are important to us.  By this I don’t mean “time to do your Labor Day shopping” or anything along the lines of what most Americans mean when they talk about preparing for “the holidays” – I mean making sure that in the worst kinds of personal or collective exigency, we’d have the basics to make something special.

Think about how archetypical the ability to celebrate in difficult times is – in mainstream American literature, for example, Christmas is the archetypical celebration, but it crosses cultures – there are plenty of stories in every culture about the holiday that almost wasn’t.  Think about the literature of an American childhood – Tiny Tim, Laura Ingalls and the March girls of Little Women are always figured as pulling together a way of making Christmas different, real and special, even in the most troubled of times.  And this is no accident – the ability to celebrate central holidays is proof that “we are all right even if things are tough” – proof to children, certainly, who need stability, but I think proof to adults as well.

When you build your food storage, it should include the components of festival foods – those few special things without which it “isn’t really Passover” (note, the beauty of matzah is that it tastes pretty much the same whether stored for 10 years or fresh ) or “that we always have on Dia de los Muertos.”  This may involve some recipe triage – can you make good stollen with canned butter, or with coconut oil, which lasts longer than butter?  How long does cranberry sauce store, anyway?  What would you do if you couldn’t get a goose, or a tofurkey or a ham – or whatever the traditional feasting meat is.

You may have to let some foods go – one of the things I learned when I converted to Judaism and began keeping kashruth is that it is surprisingly possible to adapt most recipes to keeping kosher.  Vegans, those dealing with gluten or other intolerances, etc… all find these things out.  They also find out that there are some things that probably they just won’t get.  I can make decent mashed potatoes without butter.  I cannot make really fabulous mashed potatoes without butter, nor can I make my father’s mashed potatoes with carmelized onions and cheese, at least not with a turkey at Thanksgiving.  So I’ve accepted that that’s no longer in my repetoir for Thanksgiving, and while I like the basic mashed pototoes ok, have decided that our family likes roasted potatoes with garlic and chiles even better.  So, mashed sweet potatoes, but no mashed potatoes (they show up as the centerpiece of dinner now and again as a treat, and that’s actually better, since they are so rich – really, who needs that much lily gilding, along with the turkey, the sweets, the pumpkin pie, the roasted onions, the…)

But I think it is important to keep as much basic structure of your accustomed meals as possible – if not the turkey, at least the ingredients of pumpkin pie, if not the marinated brussel’s sprouts, at least Grandma’s marinade, applied to some other available green.   This is the time to invest in the things that make your family identity special – the ingredients for the lasagna you always have, the wine that marks a special meal, the favorite preserve you only bring out at the holiday.  These mark the day as “like the past” and tie us to family and tradition, even if family can’t be here, or we can’t afford to go to them. 

You can endure an austerity diet, a great deal of stress and poverty much better if a few times during the year, there comes a moment of excess – one in which you eat as much fat and sweet as you could want, in which you drink more than you usually do, and in which you feel yourself momentarily freed from your constraints.  In our ordinary lives, where we often can eat and drink to excess routinely, where we are pressured to make the holiday perfect, or spend too much, we can think we’d be glad to be freed from these excesses – and sometimes that’s true.  But the stripped down version, in a stripped down life, one that maintains essentials in tough times, is, I think another thing all together.

My family can’t imagine Chanukah without latkes, or without gingerbread cookies, which come from my own family’s Christmas celebrations, but are now, made in Jewish shapes, part of our Chanukah.  Passover must have matzah, of course, and Sukkot and Thanksgiving both require pumpkin pie.  The sabbath means grape juice (wine for the grownups) and the ingredients of challah.  These are small things to add to my storage – I don’t need a six month supply of cranberry sauce, a couple of jars will suffice.  But they matter vastly in excess of their space – they remind us that the cycle of the year goes on, and that joy goes on, even when it seems most difficult to remember.

 Sharon

• Food Storage
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Sharon June 2nd, 2009

My friend Pat Meadows once pointed out that American cookbooks suffer badly from what she calls the “1/4 teaspoon” problem.  That is, many of them call for such tiny quantities of herbs and spices that they are almost unnoticeable. 1/4 teaspoon of oregano in a pot of tomato sauce is, simply speaking, lost.  The only seasoning you could add to a decent sized pot of tomato sauce that you’d notice at the 1/4 tsp level is arsenic .   This habit of underseasoning is a legacy of America’s British heritage (British cookbooks are worse, actually), and the tendency towards blandness that some species of American food have suffered from. 

It also comes from the fact that seasoning for a long time was assumed to be intuitive.  Most old cookbooks simply say “add sweet herbs” or “to taste.”  But I can’t count the number of times I’ve put “to taste” in a recipe, only to receive 30 emails asking me how much I really mean .  We like quantities, we like precision – we like to be told how things are supposed to taste.  And if you look at many (not all, and things are getting better) cookbooks, things are supposted to, well, taste pretty bland.

Perhaps because my family’s favorite culinary cultures are Asian, we use herbs and spices in large quantities – I buy them in bulk at ethnic grocery stores, or order them in bulk from various suppliers (more on this later in the post).  And, of course, I grow them.  Besides the usual American culinary herbs - parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme…plus oregano, mint, chives and basil, we grow a lot of others, including a range of Vietnamese herbs (Vap Ca, Rau ram, Rau om), variations on the classic themes (orange, lemon and nutmeg thymes, zaatar (an oregano), pineapple sage, african, cinnamon, holy, lemon and other basils), and less common culinary herbs (fennel, lovage, sweet cicely, lemon and lime balm, savories, salad burnet…you get the idea) 

 For most of us, as we adapt our diets to food storage, spices and herbs are going to be more important, and in simply much larger quantities than most Americans use them.  Most cultures that have relied heavily on staple foods season those foods heavily, either directly, or by using spiced and herbal condiments (I’ve written more on the value of condiments here http://sharonastyk.com/2009/01/22/condimental/.)

And that means adding spices and herbs to our food storage, and preserving/storing them correctly.  The first thing to know is the good news – most spices, provided that they are fair traded, are a good thing to buy from far away – so if you don’t live where cassia trees or vanilla orchids grow, you don’t have to worry much about using cinnamon or vanilla beans – things that are shipped in dry form, and used in comparatively small quantities (even if it is more than 1/4 tsp at a time ) are a good use of shipping. 

The best way to store spices is in their whole form, grinding them as you need them, or in small batches not kept more than 1 year.  In some cases, you may never have met whole spices before – a nutmeg, mace or true cinnamon bark is something unusual.  You will need a way to grind them – you can use a mortar, although this is quite a bit of work, or a mexican style metate (this is a bit easier, since it is rougher, but some spices do get caught in the stone and are hard to capture for eating), as long as there is power, an electric coffee grinder (don’t cross-use it with coffee, unless you like spice flavored coffee and coffee flavored spice) or a manual coffee grinder (this is what I use). 

 If you must buy ground spices, replace them every year, or keep them in the freezer for up to three years - use your nose – something that has little smell is not worth keeping.  If it has faded, you can use more, but it can be a losing proposition – you lose complexity as well as flavor over time. 

The best way to use most herbs, of course, is fresh, and chopping a few handfulls of them into food is a delight.  Depending on how much of each herb you use, a window box may be enough, or you may need a good sized herb bed.  If you live in a cold climate, you can often bring many culinary herbs inside for the winter – look for varieties suited to pot culture, and adapt them gradually – the dryness of indoor air can be a killer.  I find that basil simply doesn’t overwinter well for me, while rosemary, thyme, parsley and others do fine.  You’ll need to experiment.  Some herbs, like sage, which is at its best in the autumn anyway, will winter over with cover in even very cold places, keeping some green leaves to be harvested even in February.

If you are going to dry your herbs, you want to do so at comparatively low temperatures, away from direct light, in bundles of stem no thicker than a pencil (so that mold doesn’t form) and where there is good air circulation – I hang them in my kitchen, but you may have a better place.  Don’t hang them anywhere that gets to temperatures higher than 100 degrees.  When the herbs are dry, rub them off the stems, and store them in airtight containers away from light.

If you are growing spices (and all of us can grow some spices - I grow cayenne and other hot peppers, poppy seed, cumin seed, coriander seed, dill seed, mustard, fennel seed and celery seed), you will want to wait until the plants are ripe and, if your seasoning is the seed, wait until the seed is dry, winnow and clean the seed, and then store in a cool dark place in airtight jars.  Grind them as close to when you use them as possible for best flavor.  Or, use them whole, and “pop” them in a hot dry skillet to toast.

For chili peppers and garlic, you may need to actually dehydrate them in a solar or electric dehydrator, depending on your climate.  Some will dry right on the vine, even in my climate, but meatier peppers probably need a stint in the dehydrator.  A blender is a great tool for pureeing a bunch of chili peppers or dried garlic into powder (do remember to put the lid on – you do not want to inhale a big breath of chili peppers being blended – ask me how I know this ).

Another option for your herbs is tincturing in alcohol or vinegar.  We tend not to think of tinctures in association with culinary herbs, but with medicinals, but in fact, many culinary herbs and spices are used in tincture form – vanilla is a tincture of vanilla bean, for example.  Mint extract is a tincture of mint leaves, often in brandy.  Vinegars flavored with herbs make wonderful salad dressings, and are a form of tincture.  The advantage of tinctures is that they keep forever, and are truly essence of herb.  The downside is, of course, that they contain alcohol or vinegar, and taste of it, but small quantities, they flavor baked goods, pudding and other recipes.  I’ve been experimenting with tinctures of other herbs and some of them are excellent – tincture of rosemary, for example, is just delicious in baked goods. I love salad burnet in vinegar – the cucumbery taste goes perfectly with vinegars.

To make a tincture, take fresh or dried herb or spices, and cover them with either vinegar or 80 proof alcohol – vodka or brandy are traditional.  If the spices are whole, chop them up a bit so that the full value permeates the menstruum (a fancy word for “booze” or “vinegar” ) Leave for two weeks at room temperature (you can put the alcohol tinctures in the sun, but not the vinegar ones), and macerate the material.  Taste occasionally, when when the strength you want, strain out any plant material you don’t want.  We just leave our vanilla beans in the alcohol when making vanilla, but find that spearmint gets too intense after a while.

Finally, there are a few herbs that don’t preserve well most ways – basil, parsley, dill, cilantro.  These preserve best as frozen pestos – or if not pesto, mixed with oil.  Simply freezing these herbs doesn’t really fully capture their taste, and often results in offputting textural and color changes (basil turns black, for example) – but if you mix them with oil (or add cheese, nuts and garlic to make a pesto – and all of them make good pestos, btw), they freeze beautifully.  We put up a lot of basil puree – it is one of the best reasons for a freezer, IMHO.

The reality of food storage is that it depends heavily on the quality of your cooking – and the quality of one’s cooking depends on wise use of the wonderful and intensely flavored gifts of herbs and spices – so if you believe you may ever have to rely on it, you will want a good supply of these.

The cheapest source for quantities of seasonings is probably an ethnic grocery store near you - people from India, Asia and Latin America use a lot more seasonings in their cooking than most Americans do, and they sell spices in large quantities, and whole -  my local Indian grocer sells cumin, coriander and mustard seeds in 1lb quanties for only a couple of dollars. This isn’t always the most ethical way to get them, but it is inexpensive.

Although they are not all fair trade by any means, the best tasting spices I’ve ever had in my life come from www.penzeys.com.  They aren’t cheap, but bought in bulk, the prices are reasonable for many things, and the taste is terrific.

Fair traded spices are available from www.mountainroseherbs.com (they also sell herbs and teas) and frontier bulk goods www.frontier.com. 

What if you’ve been using 1/4 teaspoon of oregano, and want to add more spice to your life?  Well, the best way to do it is to just do it – google around, try some new recipes, double the quantities of garlic, turmeric or ginger in your recipes (or maybe add just a little more at a time, depending on how adventurous you are) – like everything it takes practice. 

Sharon

• Food Storage , herbs
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Sharon May 27th, 2009

In all the writing I’ve done about food storage, I’ve mostly left the topic of freezers alone.  This may seem strange, because freezing is the most frequently used technique of food storage in the developed world – if most people preserve at all, they often do it by freezing things.  The first is the ecological impact of encouraging people to have freezers, the second, the economic impact of relying on one.  I tend to think that other methods of storage are better choices – but it is worth asking when a freezer is a good idea.

The two major objections to a freezer are that generally speaking, food kept frozen would be better kept by other methods of preservation.  This is not true across the board, of course – for example, let’s say that you have an electric stove, coal fired electricity, and you happen to be the owner of a super-efficient sunfrost freezer, and you mostly use your freezer to preserve foods for less than 3 months – in that case, it might be more efficient to freeze. 

On the other hand, if you have a gas stove and an old freezer, the odds are good that it is almost never more efficient to freeze things than it is to can or otherwise preserve them.  As is always the case, the environmental impact of things is complex, even in and of itself. 

And the actual question of whether canned or frozen chicken is better isn’t really all the answer – there are other questions – is your freezer enabling you to cut down on other things – trips to the store, say?  If you live in a place where you can walk to shopping, it is probably more efficient not to freeze, and to let commercial freezers do the work.  If you live far from the store, the gas you save may balance out the effect.  Or, can you, as we do, use your freezer to help get rid of your fridge?  We use ice packs from our freezer to enable to turn off our fridge, making a substantial savings in wattage, since chest freezers are generally much more efficient than your average fridge.  Can you share a freezer with one or two other households?  Divided between them, it might make sense.

But I really don’t want to encourage people to go out and begin relying on freezers if they don’t already have one, simply because the cost – economically and environmentally – is so very high. Moreover, in a freezer, your food is vulnerable in ways it isn’t in any other storage method.

Statistically, even when freezers are working, more than 20% of all food put in a freezer is lost to freezer burn and decay – so freezers are already a problem – too much stuff gets buried in the back or the bottom, and wasted.  This problem can be reduced with good management, so IMHO, a commitment to a freezer means not letting things get wasted.  There’s something particularly disturbing about burning coal to preserve food, only to throw it out.  In contrast to the high rate of wastage associated with freezers (somehow people seem to think that freezing something puts it in permanent stasis, rather than merely retarding decay somewhat), home canned food gets wasted only 7% of the time. 

But moreover, freezers are vulnerable to either localized (and by localized this can be as local as “my husband accidentally kicked the cord out and we didn’t notice until it was too late) or widespread power outages.  The reality is that if you keep food in your freezer, sooner or later, you will probably have an extended power outage.  Can you afford to lose hundreds of dollars worth of food?  Only you can answer that question, but for many people, the real problem of the freezer is that you can’t afford the potential loss.

One possible way of mitigating this problem is to be good at pressure canning – if you have an alternate heat source, and are willing, when the power goes out, to spring into action to preserve anything that can be preserved, probably by pressure canning (dehydration would be great, but often when the power is out, the weather is not conducive to solar dehydration, and your electric one won’t work ).  This is a lot of work – it is our backup strategy – in our case, since most of what we store is our meat supply at the end of the butchering season, I know those chickens and turkeys will simply be canned, and am reasonably sure of not losing them. But then again, I have a wood cookstove, a supply of wood, and experience pressure canning. 

Now I like a lot of foods better frozen than other methods of preservation – but then again, I like the layered eggplant casserole at the expensive italian restaurant better than I like my own version, but life’s like that sometimes .  And since I like fresh and root cellared food even better than frozen vegetables and meat, the solution for me personally is to try more season extension, to root cellar more and better, and to grow more animal feed so that some of my chickens can be kept over the winter and butchered as needed. 

For the moment, we’re keeping the freezer, but I admit, I’m ambivalent about our own use of it (primarily to sell meat off the farm) and about recommending freezing to anyone.  Yes, if you already have a freezer, and are going to run it, you might as well run it full.  But would I recommend people go out and buy a chest freezer?  I don’t think so – too much embodied energy, too high a cost, too much dependence on fossil fuels, too many other alternatives.  I can justify ours because of our profession, and also because our net energy consumption (because we’ve been able to get rid of our fridge) is lower, but the next step is freezer-free.

Sharon

• Food Storage
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