Archive for May 31st, 2011

10 Years of Food Preservation

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 [email protected]!

Bad Blogiste, Bad!

Sharon May 31st, 2011

So I know I’ve been pretty slack here on the blog in the last couple of weeks - the combination of flooding, spring, foster parent prep, spring, garden work, plant sales, Goat Camp at my house, spring and a few other things have meant that my online work has gotten the proverbial lick and promise. And now I’m about to go off and be a total slacker on y’all.

You see, one of my oldest college friends is getting married this weekend. This is something of an event in a whole lot of ways. First there’s the fact that we’re pretty heavily excited for Jesse. Jesse is one of those people everyone loves - he’s the godfather of my oldest son - and about 17 other children He’s been part of every event in my life from college on. And for the last few years before he met Rachel, he was lonely. So much so that I offered (threatened?) to take over the search for a suitable partner for him if he didn’t get it together. Fortunately, Rachel came along before that extreme was necessary - and we’re really happy. So we’re off for a busy week of partying in celebration!

More importantly, Jesse played extensive pranks at my wedding to Eric, at my first wedding, and at *at least* one wedding of each of our friends involved in the wedding. These included things like hiding alarm clocks set to go off every hour on the hour during the wedding night and changing the music we walked into to something err..inappropriate. Now I don’t hold a grudge - I believe strongly in no quarter asked or given in this sort of friendship. Indeed, I cheerfully helped him with other wedding pranks on people we both love - painting the getaway car with “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here” (in the english and the original, thanks), filling a car with popcorn through the sunroof, etc…

However, quite a lot of us owe Jesse a little err…attention. Moreover, I feel personally that since I became a farmer with livestock, my potential pranking options have dramatically increased. Chickens, for example, belong at every wedding ceremony! Now Rachel, his future bride, is an innocent here. We bear her no ill will, and have promised we will be just as careful to protect her from collateral damage as our own government is in protecting civilian casualties. I can’t think why she isn’t reassured.

So I hate to say this, but I just won’t have much time to blog between now and Sunday - between wishing Jesse and Rachel well and wishing them well…umm…. I’ll be busy. I realize this makes me a bad, bad blogiste, and apologize for leaving you in the hands of the rest of the internet. I know that they will provide you with plenty of blonde jokes, information about 2012 and fashion news, however - or you could read some of the nice folks on my sidebar or at Scienceblogs.

If, however, you are in or around the North Shore of Boston, I will be giving a talk on Local Food Resilience and What to Eat in the Future in Newbury, MA onThursday at 7pm. I hope to meet some of you there.. Otherwise, I have to go pack my chickens for the wedding!

Sharon