The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon September 19th, 2011

I’m finding myself not quite sure what to do with my free time.  Ok, there isn’t *that* much of it, of course – after all there’s the farm, the homeschooling, the four kids, the house, the book, the work on the ASPO-USA conference and my role as a board member, a couple of miscellaneous articles to write, and some other odds and ends.  Still, it does seem strange.

As you may remember, we lost pretty much all of our annual garden a few weeks ago when first Irene and then Lee hit the area.  The squash rotted, the beans drowned, most of the apples blew down, the sunflowers blew over, the corn failed to mature, the potatoes succumbed momentarily to hideous fungal diseases.  I’m not complaining – really, I’m not – so many people in my area suffered so much that there’s nothing to complain about.  But it did leave me with a problem – just as peak preserving season hit, I had nothing to preserve.  I still have some surviving tomatillos, but they aren’t mature yet, and the peaches made a crop, but those are put away.  There are a few herbs left to dry, and some roots to dig from perennial herb crops like marshmallow and elecampane, but that’s about it – nothing compared to the usual burst of time and attention.  Since most of the neighboring farms had the same problem, finding sources of produce to put up is also problematic – I should be able to fill the root cellar and get some fall raspberries for jam, but that may be about it.

There’s no fall garden – the storms hit in those critical few weeks after almost all the fall crops were in, and when it was too late to mature much of anything but spinach and arugula before winter.  I’ve a small bed of each, but that’s pretty much it.  The structure of the storms was to put a rapid end to the late summer workload.

Meanwhile, we had anticipated we’d probably have a foster placement by now (and it isn’t like the social workers can conjure one or like we really can wish some poor group of kids would lose their home) and all of a sudden, I’m at loose ends.  Ok, they aren’t very loose – in fact, I should be working every second on my book.  But, well, I’m not – and I can’t.  During times when Eric is working, I could be preserving, but I couldn’t be off on the computer while the kids make mayhem.

Perhaps conveniently, I’ve been sick for a couple of weeks – nothing exciting, just a progression of minor viral things that lay me low.  My theory is that they are trying to get me comfortable with sitting on my butt drinking tea and reading an novel – and I did some of that.  It wasn’t as much fun as I remembered, though.

The problem, I’m finding, is that I’ve lost my taste for sitting around.  Oh, in the evenings, after chores, sure.  But after so many years of being so busy and working so hard, I find myself at loose ends.  Sometimes it is nice – time for walks and snuggles with the boys and odd jobs I’ve been putting off.  Some things get done better than before – my house is somewhat tidier, I cook more innovatively, my mending pile has shrunk, but let’s be honest – most of the time I’m just not desperate enough to clean or hem pants .

Instead, I find myself missing the structure of the dehydrator, wanting an herb drying room filled with boneset and peppermint.  I long for curing squash and sweet potatoes and the work of digging turnips.  I’m not sure why I miss these things – more leisure is a good thing, right?  Some parts are nice, but what I’ve learned is that both body and mind long for the discipline and joy of farmwork – if I needed confirmation I love my life, when a portion of it was removed, it called out to me.  Strange, but wonderful – to know that the dirt and I miss each other.

Sharon

• Food Storage , fall gardening
• Comments(16)

admin July 15th, 2011

Kathy Harrison has a great post that includes the data on canning-caused illness. Obviously, you really don’t want to mess with safety when pressure canning or canning any marginally acidic food, but it is also the case that we should have a balanced understanding of real risks and benefits:

I posted the statistics for food born illness from home canned food in the comments section but I will just add (for those that don’t read the comments) most botulism is infant botulism coming from feeding babies foods that adults can tolerate but are not good for babies (honey is one example). The second cause if wound infection as botulism occurs naturally. Take good care of even small injuries. The incidence of food born botulism is very small with only 21 cases being reported last year. You are far more likely to get ill from eating commercial spinach than from my home canned tomatoes. Here are the take home points. Use up-to-date recipes from approved sources, proper equipment and excellent hygiene and you will be fine.

I  couldn’t say it better.  Be *respectful* of the rules of canning, but don’t be fearful – you take your lives much more in your hands when you get in a car.

Sharon

• Food Storage
• Comments(5)

Sharon June 21st, 2011

Note: Rerun time – I’m spending this week getting ready for the final home visit.  After a disastrous visit by a social worker (not ours, thankfully) who was appalled by our farm and way of life, I’m not taking any chances.  So you get re-runs – but this is at least 3 years old and bears repeating, IMHO.  I’ve met so many people over the years who never expected to be pregnant (or pregnant again), caring for a grandchild or sibling’s child, etc…  Crises breed (so to speak) these sorts of situations – so please, even if you think you are past babies, or not going to conceive yourself, do think about it.)

This week I’m going to spend a lot of time on specific needs, and how to adapt your food storage to meet those needs.  Among the most common special circumstances is a childbearing woman, infant or young children.  Even if you personally are male or past childbearing, you may end up being the place of respite for family who have these issues in a crisis, and it is, IMHO, important to think about them.  I have encountered many people over the years who never expected to see their children suddenly arrive back home, to end up raising their nephews or grandchildren, or never expected to get pregnant (or pregnant again) and did.  Do not think that this information could never be relevant to most of us.  Remember, plans are good – but plans go awry regularly.

The first, and probably most essential component here is water.  I know a lot of people respond to my discussions of storing water as “ok, we’ve moved into total whack-job territory.”  And yet, I’m going to say that this is particularly important if your household includes or might include pregnant women, infants or very young children who are especially vulnerable to disease, parasites and chemical contaminations.  They also all have very little toleration for dehydration or water stress.

So if you have or might have young children, pregnant women or infants, store water, and have a way of filtering water in the long term.  If you have a limited supply of filtered or known safe water, and are worried about contamination, the last people to touch potentially contaminated water should be children or pregnant women – lifelong consequences are possible.

Pregnant women need more water and more of some nutrients.  Storing a pregnancy multivitamin if you could potentially become pregnant is not a bad idea.  Regular multivitamins will mostly suffice, though, if a varied diet is possible.  Folate (found in eggs and greens) and protein are particularly important - make sure pregnant women get more of these foods.

One issue for pregnant women may be nausea – on a food storage diet it is particularly difficult to deal with food issues.  To the extent you can, women in early pregnancy suffering from nausea should be accomodated in any way possible - the reality is that hunger makes the nausea worse and can result in a “death spiral” of being unable to eat or keep anything down long enough to deal with hunger induced increases in nausea.  This can cause dehydration, occasionally even death.  So if you are relying on food storage and have a sick pregnant woman, do the best you can to find something she can eat, if you know you plan to be pregnant and have specific triggers you might consider storing them, also if you plan to be pregnant, sea bands or ginger might work (nothing worked for me ;-) but I mention it).

Otherwise, pregnancy doesn’t require special foods.  But infants do.  Infants under 4 months (6 months is considered ideal) should be exclusively breast-fed whenever possible.  Breastfeeding is essential – and in a crisis, it can actually save lives.  Formula often becomes unavailable in a crisis, and a nursing mother can not only keep her own infant hydrated (even if she is suffering from dehydration she will continue to make some milk) but potentially other infants as well who can drink expressed milk in a bottle or cup or be taught to nurse (sometimes).  While not every woman can nurse, far more can than do, and for longer than most American women do. There’s more on the value of this here:

http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/12/52-weeks-down-week-30-nurse-and.html

But what about women who can’t nurse, or those who adopt? And, for that matter, I’m going to say something that most mothers don’t like to hear.  We aren’t immortal or invulnerable – trust me, I know how it feels to believe that you have to be ok, because your children depend so much on you.  But things happen sometimes to mothers.  And the survival of our babies and children shouldn’t depend on the ability of any one adult to be present and to feed them.  So having some kind of backup situation makes sense.

That backup situation could be another lactating woman in close proximity, it could be a goat (not a cow), or it could be a store of infant formula.  I know that we should whenever possible, store what we use and vote with our dollars.  But every time I had a baby, before I gave birth, my husband and I bought a six month supply of generic, cheap infant formula.  It lasts about 2 years in storage (and unopened can be safely used for another year or two, but will lose nutritional value and may not adequate, so do this only in a dire emergency to keep a baby alive – a wet nurse or goat would be better) and before it expired, we would give it to our local food pantry that always desperately needed formula.

I am a passionate advocate of breastfeeding – but I care much more that babies live even if their Moms aren’t around, or can’t nurse them, and someone be able to take care of the babies around them. Only you know if your circumstance merits doing this, but it is something to think seriously about – I think of it as a charitable donation, one I hope never to need myself.

Once an infant is 4 months old (again, six is considered optimal, but by 5 months my kids were always grabbing food out of my mouth at the table, so thought they were ready), you can gradually begin transitioning them to mashed up solids.  (Actually, when I was an infant, solids were begun as early as 6 weeks – this is not recommended now, but if formula or breastmilk were in short supply, it could be considered – again, do it only if you have to.)  Waiting longer is considered better, particularly if you have a family history of food allergies.

Babies don’t need “baby food” per se, although it is good to start them on mashed up very simple, low allergen foods like white rice, greens, potatoes or orange vegetables.   But again, they should be primarily getting their food from mother’s milk, goat’s milk or formula until nearly a year – babies need a high fat, high protein, high quality diet.  If you think they may come into your orbit, store for them.

Young children, under 2, need more fat than most people, so storing some extra high fat food is a good idea.  Fish oil is a particularly useful thing if you can keep it cool, because it enhances brain development. Otherwise, they simply need a balanced, healthy diet.  But this can be tough with young children, since toddlers often are extremely picky eaters.  This means that storing familiar foods and getting kids familiar with whole foods used in storage is especially important.

Toddler pickiness has some evolutionary advantages – as they get more mobile, they get more choosy about what they eat, which is protective.  It is helpful to recognize that this is a passing stage, and just concentrate on finding foods they like.  Remember also that toddlers often have to encounter an unfamiliar food over and over again before they will try it – keep trying.   Generally speaking, if they aren’t making a radical dietary transition – that is a complete break from familiar foods – which they shouldn’t be, since we’re all trying to eat what we store – kids won’t generally do themselves any harm.

For healthy older children, I think a low-tolerance policy towards picky eating is important – I’ve written more about getting over picky eating here.  And again, kids make it extra-urgent that you begin eating out of your food storage regularly.

Sharon

• Food Storage
• Comments(7)

Sharon June 7th, 2011

I wrote Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Preservation and Storage because when it came time for me to take the next steps in eating locally and homegrown – to holding some of summer’s bounty for the long winter, there wasn’t any book that really covered what all I needed to know. After writing A Nation of Farmers about the “Why” of growing your own and eating locally, I ran into hundreds of people who had the same problem. They wanted to keep eating the same great food after the CSA boxes stopped coming or the farmer’s market closed down, but they didn’t know how.

One of the things I found as I became more expert at food preservation, and started to spend more time teaching and talking about it is that most of us have a mental image in our heads when we hear “preservation” mentioned. We think about canning, and about our grandmothers standing over a kettle in August, often for days on end. Indeed, when I did interviews they almost always began with someone’s memory of putting by food – and always by canning.

Now canning is a great technique for certain foods, and if it is done right at home, it is both safe and yields a much better tasting product than any industrial scale food could ever offer. And how would it not?  Instead of a company buying a whole orchard’s worth of peaches, all standardized to produce good canning quality but little flavor, shipped for several days after green picking, and then industrially processed, you can take peak-ripe food, often bought very cheaply at the height of the season or grown in your own garden, and process it to your own taste. I do a fair amount of canning, and I enjoy it – in part because I also don’t spend weeks over a hot kettle.

But assuming that canning is the main form of food preservation available to us doesn’t serve us all that well. People who have that mental image of grandma with a hot pressure canner (or worse, the image of an explolding pressure canner – old ones did explode sometimes, but they don’t anymore) immediately leap to the conclusion that storing and preserving food is too much work. Plus, for those of low income there’s the barrier of acquiring equipment, and it takes time to build up a supply of used canning jars – and new ones are pricey.  You either need new lids or better, the reusable ones, but they also can be costly.

Now all of these issues can be overcome – it is possible to shift the season of some canning. For example, I plant my main crop of cucumbers in late June or early July, rather than in May, like my neighbors. This means I’m not making pickles and running the stove in August, but doing it in late September, when the heat of my stove is wanted anyway. By using other food preservation techniques, and only canning when that’s the best way for my family, I get more free time, and cooler. Laying out sweet corn in my solar dehydrator in August means that after a short bit of cutting, I go in and drink iced tea and allow the sun to do my work for me. Preserving food doesn’t have to be hard – although there is some work involved, of course. But as long as we’ve got the assumption that it must be, we won’t experiment.

Moreover, the other reason this bothers me is that canning is a fairly new technique.  It was developed for Napoleon’s army in the early 19th century, so we’ve had canning for less than two centuries. On the other hand, human beings have been putting food by as long as there have been human beings – in cold or dry periods where crops do not grow, and for years of crop failure, drought or disaster, taking the excess of summer and autumn and putting it aside for times to come is one of the most basic and necessary of human activities. While canning is very useful for some things, if human beings couldn’t store up food for dry or cold seasons and eat well without canning, we’d all pretty much be dead. I don’t like to give canning pride of place simply because doing so crowds out the other ways we can preserve food, and our long and deep history of holding summer through the winter or the dry season.

Preserving food is simply too useful a technique to be abandoned because we assume that preservation means “canning.” During high summer, at the produce peak, most farmers have bulk quantities of produce for *vastly* less money than retail prices. The same farmer that sells tomatoes for $2.50 lb may have a bushel for $20 (these are real prices, local to me, your own will vary by location and the season). A bushel of tomatoes will keep you in salsa and sun dried and fresh salad tomatoes for quite a while if you can come up with the $20, and will get you five times as many tomatoes as the same $20 would get you buying retail.

Potatoes in the fall run 70 cents a pound or more here – or 50lbs for $12. It doesn’t take a math genius – and while many smaller families might quail at the thought of using up 50lbs of potatoes, it actually isn’t that hard if you can use the simple technique of natural cold storage (commonly known as root cellaring, although you don’t actually need a cellar, just any place that stays cool and doesn’t freeze – an enclosed porch, spare bedroom closed off from the house, an old fridge or freezer on a porch, a garage, hay bales in a barn). You’ll save a lot of money, trips to the store, and if you don’t eat them all, you can plant them in the spring when they begin to sprout and make more potatoes.

Season extension, natural fermentation, cheesemaking, dehydrating, preserving with sugar, salt or alcohol, natural cool storage – all of these are great ways to store some food. And with some judicious canning, together they make a complex and wonderful diet for the seasons of our lives in which things do not grow. But no one technique is all.

Whenever I do interviews or teach classes, the first thing I do is try to very gently let people know that this isn’t all about canning. Sometimes someone confesses that the thought of pressure canning makes them nervous. What I tell them is this – it is true that pressure canning can involve risk of botulism bacteria. However, so does eating industrially canned food – there’s no magic in the industrial process that precludes this (in fact, there was an outbreak in commercially canned chili just a couple of years ago). If you are attentive and pressure can correctly, there is no reason to be afraid of it.

However, there’s also no need to fetishize canning. Most of the other techniques we have used over the years to store food fell into disfavor, not because the techniques were valueless but because of the excitement generated by canning in the first half of the 20th century. Like baby formula and suburbia, canning was seen as modern, progressive, scientific and clean. And like baby formula and suburbia, things that might, in small quantities have been extremely useful were taken to ridiculous extremes. At the same time we were giving up the breast largely because of our sense that formula was progress, we were also giving up natural cold storage, lactofermentation and drying food.

Canning is a great addition to our repetoir – some things couldn’t be the same without it. But it is only one of many tools. The trick is for us to reclaim what is worthwhile about our past (actually that may be a large chunk of our overarching project, not just our food project) and to put things like canning into perspective – as part, but not the whole of the basic human project of provisioning ourselves.

Sharon

• Food Storage
• Comments(17)

Sharon May 31st, 2011

On June first, Eric and I and Eli (and Simon who was there in-utero) will celebrate a decade on our farm.  That’s a pretty amazing thing to me – a childhood full of moves, a young adulthood in which I changed apartments every school year – ten years is by far the longest I’ve ever been in one place. And while I had made some forays into food preservation before we moved – mostly involving alcoholic beverages (yeah, yeah, grad student stereotype come true) and condiments (homemade mustard, mint oxymel, almond milk for pouring over chocolate ice cream), the idea of seriously preserving what I actually grew hadn’t kicked in yet.  The balcony gardens I’d had in Somerville, MA hadn’t led me into serious food preservation.  Farmer’s markets just weren’t as prevalent as they are now.  Moreover, homemade food itself wasn’t as trendy.  Although I had a plan to grow and produce what we ate, I hadn’t fully made the mental leap into recognizing that one of the central steps in that process was going to be learning to put by.

I did learn it, however, the first time the zucchini exploded, the first time we had more peas than we could eat.  I learned it when our first year household budget was a grand total of 17K for Eric, Eli, me and new baby Simon.  The vast majority of that money was going to be spent on the mortgage.  3K of it was eaten up almost immediately when our well line burst.  That first year garden I planted turned out to be a big chunk of the food budget.

I found books at the library and in bookstores about food preservation, but most of them weren’t that concerned about energy usage – I wanted to know what the most efficient way to keep food was.  A lot of them didn’t seem that concerned about taste, either – yes, home canned green beans taste better than grocery store ones, but is that really the best we could do?  And they left out a lot – I was getting three gallons of milk in barter for our eggs from a dairy farming neighbor.  How do you make butter?  How long does it keep?  Another neighbor shared her garden produce – the USDA said canning pumpkin wasn’t safe anymore.  Were they right?  What else do you do with it.

I had time (or as much time as a graduate student writing a doctoral dissertation and the mother of a toddler and a newborn 20 months apart ever has) more than I had money, so I could experiment.   I did experiment – a lot.  We were given a huge bag of figs, and I pickled a bunch of them.  I learned not to pickle figs.  We went to the pick-your-own to get strawberries and then dried them, because I didn’t have enough canning jars.  I learned definitely to dehydrate strawberries.  I made butter.  Because of my pregnancy, I was  throwing up every 45 minutes, and an elderly Russian lady at our synagogue suggested I try fermented foods.  Kimchi and pickles became my best friends.

Despite our tiny budget (which did get bigger after that first year), we ate well.  Actually, we ate better than we had ever eaten before.  We felt good.  Even our picky toddler ate the fresh, delicious stuff we had.  The second year, the garden got a lot bigger, and again, we learned more tricks of the trade for food preservation.  Moreover, I was more and more concerned about resource use – how did we optimize this – how did we balance our energy consumption for preservation to ensure we came out ahead of industrial food.  And how did we make it more delicious still?

It felt, in a lot of ways, like we had to reinvent the wheel.  Don’t get me wrong – I had a lot of mentors – most of all the late, great Carla Emery, who became a personal friend.  I had a long human past to go back to – after all, food preservation is one of the oldest of all human activities, long predating agriculture.  And yet, inventing it for here, on a local diet, with a modern food sensibility and concern for health and safety felt new, as much as it was very, very old.

I decided to write _Independence Days_ in large part because of an encounter with a woman at the 2007 Community Solutions conference.  She asked me what she should do to eat locally when her 20 week CSA delivery ended.  It was a familiar question – my own CSA customers asked me the same thing, or they puzzled – why was I giving them so much cabbage and garlic in the fall, more than they could eat in a week?

It occurred to me at that moment that we’d lost our attachment to the cycle of preserving, the sense that this was natural, that abundance could be met by strategies to extend its life.    The Independence Days Challenge and the book of the same name emerged from that encounter – from the recognition that others were asking the same questions I had asked about how to keep eating locally.

I’m still learning.  I still consider myself a low-level cheesemaker, with a whole host of new projects I want to try.  Since my grad-school days, I’ve done little experimentation with alcohol making – now that Eric keeps bees, I want to make mead.  I’ve got plans to try some new lamb sausages and Carol Deppe’s book _The Resilient Gardener_ has challenged me to explore squash drying more thoroughly.  Lots of new stuff to get at.

Last year, I had my best preserving summer ever – and my worst preserving autumn in years.  We went away for 10 days in early September on  trip I wouldn’t trade for the world – my kids got to see the National Zoo and Monticello, we met new friends and took our first ever family vacation that didn’t involve mostly relatives.  I got to speak in front of Thomas Jefferson’s vegetable garden.  Given that I suspect that kind of travel may close to us over time, I’m grateful we got it. But the one-two punch of ten days gone (and more days in catch-up) and the Jewish high holidays coming in September meant I got almost no preserving done in the early fall – and an early frost meant that I lost my chance for a lot of good things.  The fall raspberries were gone before I got more than a dozen jars preserved.  I missed some of my favorite apples,  I didn’t get enough tomato sauce done to last the winter.

As I said, I’m still learning. I suspect this year, as we add to our family will bring new imperfections and failures.  I’ve come to terms with the fact that I may never get it all right.  My years of Independence Day Challenges, however, have taught me to appreciate what I have done, what I do try – what has come to be part and parcel of my life, as routine as laundry and dishes.  It has taught me to count every jar with pride, and to remember that next year comes again with new possibilities.

My eighth food storage and preservation class starts today – I feel like I know more than I did for my first class, I’m better prepared.  I also feel like I’m never prepared enough – on the one hand, this stuff is important, it can be the difference between security and insecurity, sufficiency and insufficiency.  Food matters.  On the other hand, I feel just as uncertain as I suspect my students do – worried they’ll have questions I can’t answer.  But I was a teacher for a long time before I started this subject – I have come to appreciate questions I can’t answer, because they take me places I didn’t know to go.

I have rhubarb to can, rhubarb I planted a few years ago that came back despite the depredations of chickens.  I have raspberry leaves to dry for tea, and some to feed to the rabbits – they just appeared under the spruces, and we let them grow.  I have bok-choy bolting in the heat that could still make kim chi – or could be tosssed over the fence to the goats if I don’t get to it.  My place, this place I know better than any other I have lived in, is filled with abundance, tolerant of my imperfections and ready to go.

Sharon

BTW, I still have two spaces in food storage and preservation. If you’d like one, email me at Jewishfarmer@gmail.com!

• Classes , Food Storage
• Comments(9)