The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon September 28th, 2012

Note, this comes from _Independence Days_, but I think it bears a repeat.I do want to emphasize that while you can go crazy trying to can or dry every single thing you’ve ever liked to eat so you can have it every day of the year, honestly, I think that in many ways, that’s just as nuts as  eating the pasty supermarket strawberries in January. That’s not to say that I’m not just as addicted to salsa in the winter as you are, just that the more you can get used to eating the foods that are actually in season, either fresh (think season extension) or stored fresh in a

root cellar or  equivalent, the easier on you all this preserving will be, and the easier it  will be to find the time to do it. Prioritize, prioritize, and prioritize.  On the other hand, sometimes a little hard work really does save us time. Yes, it can be a pain to chop up all those tomatoes for pasta sauce, but it is so convenient to be able to dump the whole wheat pasta into the pot and pour it over not gloppy, super sweet, supermarket sauce, but your own roasted tomato and vegetable sauce. You are investing time now for freedom later.

So here’s my food preservation year. It sounds more impressive than it is, since often I don’t get it all done. I’m going to start my preservation year when things first start get going, in May. Some of you will be able to start it much earlier, others later.

May

• Can rhubarb sauce —  a favorite dessert, and quickie breakfast dumped over raw rolled oats. It tastes much better than it sounds.
• Freeze eggs for baking and scrambling.
• Sell any extra eggs.
• Bake eggshells, pound them up and store in a coffee can to be added to home-produced chicken feed and to the watering can.
• Lactoferment dandelion green kimchi, although this isn’t really a “storage” item since it always gets eaten almost immediately.
• Freeze and can up any squash or sweet potatoes we haven’t used up. I’ll also coat some eggs with shortening and store them at room temperature, but because I won’t want them until fall, that will be later in the season. They keep about six months, so I do this more with late eggs.

June

• Pickle garlic scapes.
• Dehydrate strawberries.
• Can strawberry jam, strawberry sauce and strawberry-rhubarb pie filling.
• Freeze snap peas.
• Dehydrate sweet shelling peas.
• Dehydrate greens (this is especially good for greens on the verge of bolting late in the month —  they can be ground up and added as a filler to flours and soups).
• Can mint syrup for adding to water in the winter.
• Dry onions.

I should also pickle some early baby beets, but somehow I never get to it.

July

Preserving Boom Begins!

• Can blueberry jam, blueberry sauce, currant jam, currant juice, peach sauce, peach jam, apricot sauce, apricot jam, raspberry sauce, raspberry jam, peach chutney.
• Dehydrate blueberries, apricots, peaches, black currants, red  currants.
• Can beets.
• Make kimchi out of various greens and roots.
• Freeze grated zucchini to use as a meat extender for ground beef.
• Dehydrate zucchini.
• Pickle green beans. (I don’t bother to preserve green beans any other way. We don’t like them frozen, dried or canned, so they, like asparagus, are one of those things we enjoy when we’ve got them.)
• Dry and braid garlic.

For us, tomatoes, corn and peppers do start this month, but they are too new to bother preserving —  I wait for the glut later in the season. I manipulate my cucumber harvest so that most of them come in around September, when it is cooler.

This is also when I seriously start my root cellaring garden. Some things, like parsnips, potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash and Brussels sprouts have already gone in, but most of the carrots, beets, cabbage, celeriac, and other root crops are planted in July, as is some more kale and collards.

August

• Can tomatoes for salsa, tomato sauce, and diced tomatoes.
• Dehydrate tomatoes.
• Dehydrate sweet peppers.
• Freeze watermelon.
• Can watermelon juice (surprisingly good).
• Dehydrate watermelon (really good!).
• Make watermelon rind pickles.
• Freeze sweet peppers.
• Pickle, dehydrate and freeze hot peppers (this depends on the variety: cayenne, kimchi, aleppo and poblanos get dried; jalapenos, fish peppers and bananas get pickled; serranos get frozen).
• Freeze and dehydrate sweet corn.

I might make some cucumber or zucchini pickles too, if it isn’t too hot. Or I might not.

August is also when the last crops of greens, peas and favas go in, except spinach and arugula, which can keep going until September. Oh, and when I make raspberry vodka.

September

More of all of the above, plus cucumber pickles and beets. I also usually pickle some onions. By late September I may be harvesting dried-on- the-plant foods like dry corn, popcorn, amaranth and dried beans as well, or I might wait until October, depending on how things look. We also start canning applesauce and dehydrating apples. Most of the early apples don’t keep that well, so they are better eaten fresh, sauced and dried. Since September tends to be the last month I can reliably solar dehydrate, I try to do the dried apples then, but if I don’t get it done, they can be hung up behind the wood stove.

October

• Harvest all the stuff we dried on the plant.
• Can more applesauce, pear sauce, green tomato pickles.
• Preserve late fruit (raspberries, apples, quinces, pears) in liquor.
• Make apple butter.
• Make cider syrup for pancakes.
• Make late fruit leathers.

It is also when we start butchering chickens and turkeys, and if I’m really ambitious, I’ll can some of them —  the meat and the broth —  since I’m trying to minimize my freezer usage. Usually they get frozen, though. I make more late tomato sauce until the last harvest comes in. Also my own V8 juice.

We also start filling the root cellar — digging the potatoes, beets, turnips, harvesting the cabbages, etc. But the balance is hard. Because our root cellar is actually an unheated porch, we have to wait to put things in until it is consistently cold, but if we wait too long we get the fun of pulling beets out of frozen ground. So there’s always a race.

November

Most years, the race goes into November. We’re still preserving food, although the focus has moved away from canning and dehydrating. In November it’s cold enough to do large-scale lactofermentation. Until now, we’ve been making kimchi and sauerkraut in small quantities, to be eaten right away. Now we move towards big bucketfuls, because the process of fermentation slows down and we can keep it for months.

• Ferment daikon, cabbage, carrots, napa, bok choy and other greens.
• Dig potatoes and see if we have to buy more.
• Put the carrots in buckets of sand.
• Hang the onions.
• Add in fall butchering and late canning.
• Put up the coldframes and mulch things to overwinter.
• Gather the nuts —  if we can beat the other nut-eaters.

December

This is the time to make presents and make cute little baskets of things. And to rest on our laurels a little. It’s usually a quiet time in the food preserver’s year. Most of the root-cellared stuff is new enough that there’s no need to preserve it another way, and there’s little new coming in, maybe just a few greens from the garden.

January – April

Now comes the project of management in earnest. You have to track the stores. When onions show signs of shriveling, we put them in the dehydrator. When the apples start to go soft, I start canning applesauce. A squash develops a spot? Great, cut it up and freeze it, or can it. It isn’t intense, the way summer preserving is, but it is constant, a little here, a little there, it all adds up. And that’s pretty much the way it will be until May, when the cycle starts again.

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Sharon May 23rd, 2012

It seems like an age since I’ve written anything much about food storage.  It felt for a long while like I’d said most of what I had to say in my book (Independence Days) on the subject, and that I didn’t want to be redundant - but I’m reminded regularly by questions that some things do bear repeating, because of course, we’re all ready to hear different stuff at different times.  New readers join us, and of course, events point out things with a new urgency.

So I thought I”d do a review of some of the basics of food storage on this site, going over some older material and adding some new stuff.  As we get started, however, I’d like to ask what you’ve been doing and thinking about food storage, and if there are things you’d like me to write about.

I admit, I’ve been somewhat less diligent this year than in the past keeping up with my storage, and because of that have had some sudden shortages - we ran out of pasta, brown sugar and brown rice, things I normally have on hand.  I need to do a full sort out of my storage and see what I’ve got and where my resources have to go in the future.

What about you?  If you’ve never stored food before, what are you major questions?  If you’ve been doing it for a bit, what has changed?  Are there things you’d like to add or know about, or things you’d recommend others do differently?  Have you used your food storage?  How?  Added to it?  Are  you keeping more or less?  How urgent do you feel about it?

Let me know, and I’ll respond!

Sharon

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Sharon February 15th, 2012

Here’s the syllabus - I still have a couple of regular spots and one scholarship spot available, so please email me at [email protected] if you’d like one.  The class runs six weeks starting tomorrow and is asynchronous and online.  Cost of the class is $100.   Hope some of you can join us!

Week 1,  - Introduction to Food Storage, How much, where to put it, and how?  Can I afford this?  Overview of food preservation methods, their energy and economic costs.  Storing Water, making space.  Food safety, thinking about the food future, recommended reading.

Week 2, : Water bath canning 101, Preserving with Salt, Sugar and Honey, Bulk purchasing, sourcing local foods, finding food to preserve, what food storage can and can’t do, eating more locally year round.

Week 3: Dehydration basics, Tools you need and where to get them, Menu making and how to get people to eat from your pantry, Setting up your kitchen for food storage, Storing herbs and spices, Sourdoughs and grain ferments, Preserving foraged foods.

Week 4 : Lactofermentation; Special needs, dietary and health issues;  Storing food for children, pregnant and lactating women; Storing medications, gluten-free storage;  Basic dairy preservation;  Building up your pantry and Managing your reserves. Reducing food waste.

Week 5: Pressure Canning; Beverages, Teas and Drinks; Preserving in Alcohol, Coops and Community Food Security; More Menus and Recipes; Root Cellaring and in-Garden Storage, building Community Reserves.  What will we eat when in a low energy future?

Week 6: Season extension, Preserving Meats, Sprouting, The next Steps, Getting Your Community Involved, Teaching others, Food Preservation as a Cottage Industry, The long view of food storage and preservation.

Sharon

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Sharon February 6th, 2012

Are you gearing up for the new garden season and thinking ahead about what to do to make your garden work all year long for you?  Concerned about the rising price of food and looking for ways to feed your family through tougher times?  Want to get in on the fun and wonderful flavors of home preserved food?   Concerned about how to adapt your storage or preserving to special diets?  Want to make the most of your farmer’s market?   All of the above?  I’ll be teaching a six week online, asynchronous (ie, you don’t have to be online at any particular time) class on food storage and preservation starting on Thursday, February 16 and running until the end of March.  Cost of the class is $100, and I do have five scholarship spots available to low income participants in need.  If you’d like to donate to the scholarship fund, you can also do that - 100% of all donations goes to make more spots available to low income people who wouldn’t ordinarily be able to take the class.

Email me at [email protected] for details or to enroll.

Sharon

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Sharon November 14th, 2011

As those of you who have been reading for a while know, I don’t actually have a true root cellar.  Instead, what I have is a south-facing sunporch that doesn’t freeze until we get to about -20 (which happens about 1-2x per winter here).  So for 99% of the time between November and March, I have a highly functional, if imperfect cold space for storing produce.  I hang blankets over the windows to prevent excess light from sprouting tomatoes and keep spare blankets for tucking over the produce if things get crazy-cold.

We put up, for a family of 7, about 250lbs of potatoes, 2oo lbs of onions, around 50-60 good sized squash of various types, 100lbs each of carrots and parsnips (we would eat more carrots than this, but they don’t store as well as some others), 12 bushels of apples (lots of apple fiends in my house, including our new little guy, M.), 200 lbs of sweet potatoes, 60+ heads of cabbage, 100+ heads of garlic (we really like garlic ) and lesser quantities of beets, turnips, celery root, pears, quinces and other vegetables.  While some things will run out over the course of the winter, we will still be eating onions, potatoes, squash and apples into May most years.  Add to this our in-garden crops (usually more than this year, since we lost the garden to Hurricanes Irene and Lee), which usually include spinach, scallions, kale and winter lettuces, and our preserved and stored food - bulk grains and legumes, condiments and home-preserved items and this forms the bulk of our diet for a good portion of the year.

Normally we fill the cellar gradually, over the course of a sustained harvest season.  With the destruction of our fall garden and many of our summer crops, this year is a little different - our root cellar produce is coming from further away, from farms up in the hills and downstate that weren’t hit as hard as the surrounding ones.  We’ve always relied at least a little on other farms to supplement a bad crop in a difficult year or to expand on what we grow (for example, we grow sweet potatoes here, but it is just too cool and wet for them to be totally happy - mine run small, whereas the sandy-soiled farms in the valley produce real lunkers great for roasting, so we always buy some), but this year we’re doubly grateful for the interconnections that bring food from further away (still not terribly far) to us.

There’s an art to timing root cellaring - for those with true underground storage with fairly consistent temps, this isn’t such a big deal, but for us, we have to wait until things are fairly consistently cold.  An occasional January thaw or November or March day in the 60s is no big deal if the nights are cool - the blankets and insulation help keep things stable, but an extended warm stretch can cause problems.  Still, in general some temperature fluctuations are mostly handled pretty well - at least by everything but the carrots.

We are unable to keep perfect humidity or apples entirely away from potatoes, and find that this just doesn’t matter that much.  Most of the foods in our cellar last fairly well - we could optimize, of course, but that would require more energy and resources than we want to put into it, and we find it more useful to put our energy into say, making kimchi out of the carrots and cabbage nearing their end, or making applesauce out of the apples that shrivel.

This sort of lazy-woman’s root cellaring is the kind of thing that probably many families can do - finding an underused closet and cutting some ventilation, or walling off a corner of a basement, porch or mudroom with insulation enough to keep things from freezing.  The money and time it saves is enormous, and the quality of food we get is also wonderful - things taste fresh, sweet and delicious for months, and it allows us to put our food dollars where we most want them - back in our pockets in years when we grow our own, in the pockets of nearby farmers the rest of the time.

The meals that come out of our cellar are wonderful too - we always have the ingredients of delicious, flavorful meals - a little broth and we’ve got vegetable soup with rich, complex flavors.  A little meat and we have stew.  Some curry paste and we’ve got curried vegetables.  Some tofu and we’ve got a stir-fry.  Add chicken and we’ve got a classic sabbath dinner of roasted chicken, roasted vegetables and greens.  Shepherd’s pie, lentil soup, massaman curry, bubble and squeak, kimchi-vegetable soup, sweet potato pie… it all comes almost effortlessly from our vegetable cold storage.

Sharon

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