The Inventory of the Cellar

As the harvest/preserving season wraps up for the 2013 season, I organized the cellar and freezer and took stock of how much food we’ve produced and put by for the year. I was a little more detailed in my record keeping this year than I have been in the past, as I work to figure out how much food we actually need, how much it costs and how much I save, etc. 

These records are purely for my own information, but I’m posting them in case anyone is interested (and also, because if they are on the blog, I won’t lose them.)

In the cellar:

246 jars of food (fruit, vegetables, jams, sauces/salsas/condiments, syrups, soups.)

16 delicata squash (each will provide one meal)

6 large pie pumpkins (will equal approx 20 cans of pumpkin)

22 lbs fresh-stored carrots (with more to harvest)

12 lbs fresh-stored beets (I canned half the beet harvest as pickled beets)

17 lbs potatoes (with more to harvest)

? dried beans (haven’t shelled them yet. Maybe 5 lbs? Not much.)

62 heads of garlic (enough for planting this fall, too.)

75 onions

several bunches of dried herbs (dill, parsley, basil, thyme, oregano, lavender)

8 quarts of dried fruit and tomatoes

24 sheets of fruit leather (equals about 96 “fruit roll-ups”)

 

In the freezer:

5 lbs carrots

2 lbs broccoli

5 gallons of soups

4 quarts of chopped green onions

2 lbs chopped bell peppers

7 cups of spaghetti sauce

14 cups of pesto

I chose to can most of our food this year when it was possible, since freezer space is limited.

These totals don’t include the fresh veggies we’ve eaten through the summer, beginning in May and lasting about 5 months. Most meals were planned around what was coming out of the garden.

Meat:

16 chickens

3 turkeys (yet to be butchered)

1 goat (yet to be butchered.)

(hoping this will total about 40 meals’ worth of food, plus broth for soups.)

(There is also hope still for one -or two- elk this year, which would provide a full year's worth of meat, and enough to share.)

Dairy (year totals)

About 50 gallons of milk (I don’t keep daily records. This is a close estimate.)

About 45 dozen eggs (again, this is an estimate. They slow down in the winter, but produce 3-4 dozen per week during the summer.)

I wish I had the numbers to put a value to all of the food in this house right now, but I’m not that organized yet.

But the total cost of all of it?

$175 in locally, farm-purchased fruits and vegetables that I didn’t/couldn’t raise myself.

$60 in garden seeds

$60 in meat birds

Approx $120 in meat chicken feed

Another $120 in egg hen feed (not including the feed cost of the show birds.)

$240 in grain for goats

Not sure of the cost of jar lids, bought about $24 of canning jars this year, plus spices, sugar, etc. that I didn’t keep records of. Estimating about $75 in those supplies.

So total cost for the above listed foods? $824

Also, figure at least 250 hours of work. At least. Honestly, it’s probably a whole lot more, but sometimes it’s hard to decipher work from play around here.

The amount seems enormous, but when it's spread over 6 months or so, it's not terrible... and if I make the effort, I could cut our monthly grocery bill down to about $100 for 5 or 6 months.  That puts us at roughly $233 per month, eating healthy, organically grown vegetables, pastured meat, raw milk and fresh eggs. I realize some folks live on plenty less than this each month, but seriously y'all, we eat really good food!

 

So is it worth it? Absolutely.

 Raising meat chickens is utterly uneconomical, between the cost of the birds and feed, the amount of work required in the raising and butchering of them… if we could find a way to hatch our own meat chicks and raise our own feed, it would make more sense. (I’ve heard you can raise chickens almost entirely on clabbered cow’s milk. I’m not opposed to trying this when our cow is in milk) Turkeys are a much bigger bang for your buck, even when raised from poults. Goats can be expensive, since grain is a requirement, but the milk they provide for drinking, cooking, plus yogurt, cheese, etc. is so worth it… and goats provide a lot of fun, too. (Most people pay more for a monthly cable bill than we do for our goats, and goats are far more entertaining!) We also raise all the hay our animals will use, and they graze pasture during the spring, summer, and fall. This cuts down significantly on the cost of meat and milk production. It’s hard for me to estimate the value of the egg chickens vs. the cost of their feed, since most of our chickens are show-breed bantams that The Oldest raises for fun (and are therefore worthless when it comes to laying.)

The garden is amazing, though. The sheer number of pounds of food produced with just $60 worth of seeds in incredible. Fresh vegetables all through the summer months and well into the fall and winter. The fertilizer is provided by the menagerie in the barns, the water comes from our irrigation, and the man-power is provided by Two Little Girls and myself. (Bonus: gardening and other farm chores also provide a great daily workout, omitting what some folks pay in gym memberships.)What doesn’t get eaten provides extra feed for the animals. 

Are we anywhere close to self-sufficient? Not at all. Until I can grown my own wheat and oats, we'll still be making monthly trips to the grocery store. Though I have started looking into the details of raising sugar beets, just as an experiment...

When I sent Littlest One down-cellar the other day for a jar of pears, she came up with them and said, “Do you know what I thought when I went into the cellar? I thought, ‘I’m so proud of my mom for putting all this food in here for us to eat.’”

So is it worth it? Yep, you betcha. And it's even kinda fun, too. :-)

Potatoes: The Treasure Hunt

Some days, it's hard to tell the difference between what is work and what is play.

Take digging potatoes, for instance. Surely smiles like this don't come from hard work...

And laughter of this variety can't come from chores... can it?

Ah, but maybe it can.

There are some wonderful opportunities out there for convincing children that work really can feel like play, if only it's approached with the right attitude. Or if it's turned into a wrestling match for the biggest potato pulled out of the ground.
 
We've never grown potatoes before. This whole Digging Potatoes experience was a splendid one, for all three of us.  It's a veritable treasure hunt, and one that requires Two Little Girls (and their Momma) to be elbow-deep in soil. And any job that involves a good bit of getting dirty is bound to be welcomed.

I'd love to offer you all a few great tips and hints for growing and harvesting potatoes, but I've got nothin'. We're brand new at this, and from all I have read, we did everything all wrong. The skins are thin because you're supposed to withhold water for a couple of weeks (someone should have told that to those rain storms that keep rolling through in the afternoons.) You're supposed to wait until the plants die back after frost to harvest, except that more than half of our potatoes already weighed over a pound and a half each, and I can't see letting them get any bigger. It'll only take one potato to feed all four of us at that rate.

So while they won't store in the cellar long, and they aren't anywhere close to being the perfectly shaped potatoes you find at the store, I'm sure we'll happily be eating baked potatoes and home-fries for a few weeks to come, anyway.

And next year, I'll read about harvesting potatoes before I decide to dig them all out of the ground. ;-)

The Urgency of Fall

I don't whine very often. Or, well, I try not to. I love having a blog filled with cheerfulness and stories of happy and satisfying things. Because really, my life is filled with happiness and satisfying things. And I know I don't have a right to complain. But once in awhile...

Honestly, I don't think it's complaining. It's just stress! There is SO much to do, and so much I want to be doing, and I don't know which way to turn, I don't know which way is forward or which way is backward.

I think feeling the fall in the air is making me feel like I'm under pressure to get everything done. The land around me is sending out it's warning, "You only have a month left to prepare yourself before the ground is frozen solid and it's too cold to go outside!" I hate how gleeful it is in this threat - all those bright, beautiful leaves of flaming red and golden amber, happily announcing that winter is, in fact, just around the corner.

Don't get me wrong, I love fall. I love that the sweltering heat of summer is finally gone, that the air is crisp and we can play outside without risking heat exhaustion. I think my problem is that I love fall so much that I just want to sit outside and enjoy it, instead of all this work I'm doing inside.

I'm to the point where I don't care if I see another ripe tomato as long as I live. Or at least until next July. Pints and quarts of salsa, soup, dried tomatoes, diced tomatoes, pizza sauce, spaghetti sauce... it's all in there, stored up to keep us nourished this winter. And I still have one more box to go. A month ago all I wanted was to be eating raw, sliced tomatoes with a bit of salt and pepper. Well, I'm over that.

School is (somehow) back in full swing. We manage about four hours a day on a good day... which means more like two hours a day on average days. Somehow, getting tomatoes in jars before they rot seems a lot more pressing than learning why Franklin Pierce was a fairly worthless president. Aw, who am I kidding? Even riding the horses or chasing the goats seems more important than Pierce.

The garden is nearing it's end, and I'm encouraging it by failing to water it - ever - and hoping it'll just hurry up and die off. It's done its job, we have veggies in the freezer. Now, I would like a break from weeds and aphids and squash and hungry grasshoppers. I think I'll dig the carrots today. Because nothing is more fun than digging carrots out of compacted clay soil. Really, you should try it.

The house hasn't been properly cleaned since, um... we moved in back in February. Spring came so quickly that by the time we were unpacked, we were suddenly drowning in The To-Do List that comes with trying to learn how to care for a 40 acre ranch. Animals and outdoor work and outdoor play take precedence over house cleaning. I wash laundry, and dishes, and occasionally (if it rains) I manage to dust or vacuum. But this darn beautiful fall air is making feel like I need to be deep cleaning... which is, of course, impossible when one's entire kitchen is brimful of vegetables and fruits that the fruit flies are dangerously close to consuming in their entirety.

It's nothing that doesn't happen every single year about this time. An urgent need to get everything done coupled with an urgent need to sit in my wooden chair on the deck and bask in the beauty of fall.

I think the best remedy for it is to go pour a glass of wine and sit and watch the leaves change colors.

After I finish canning these tomatoes.

A Walk Through the Garden

 I haven't done much blogging or photographing of the garden this year. This is mostly because I'm disappointed in myself for not having as pretty of a garden as I've had in the past. It looks... well, it looks like a first year garden in a new climate. You know, because it is a first year garden in a new climate.


It's about 30 ft by 70 ft. I wanted it bigger, but tilling turned out to be quite a chore, and this was the most The Man of My Dreams could muster the time and energy to do. And now I'm grateful for that, since it's proving plenty big enough for my first year up here.

This picture is of weeds. Yep - that's how bad it is. I pull a wheelbarrow full of weeds each morning and night, but the bindweed and the goat-heads are just awful. Hopefully a few years of diligent weeding will prove successful. Apparently all the tilling The Man of My Dreams did for me ended up spreading the weeds, making them even worse.

Next year, no tilling.


I've also been disappointed because nothing seems to be growing. But what I've come to realize is that everything is definitely growing, it just all ripens about six weeks later that it did when we lived in The Big City. Six weeks is a very long time for a girl who has been waiting all year for fresh green beans and tomatoes. But we're getting there. 

Next year, patience.

 If there's one thing I can say about living here, it's that pollination isn't a problem. Every flower gets pollinated - bees and wasps abound, and they are doing their work diligently. In The Big City, many tomato blossoms would drop before they were pollinated, between the heat and the lack of bees. Not here though - cooler temperatures and an abundance of buzzing insects means plenty of pollination.

 I'm amused at how things that I couldn't grow for the life of me in The Big City are doing so well here. Broccoli never got a chance to develop a head before, because it would get so hot so fast. On nine broccoli plants this year, the heads weighed out at fifteen pounds, and we're still harvesting from the side shoots nearly every other day. I finally pulled out all the spinach - I put by thirty bags of frozen spinach before it bolted. In The Big City, cucumbers would wilt and shrivel in the dry heat if they weren't watered in the middle of the afternoon, and the fruits would be bitter. Here, the vines are clamboring up my pitiful trellis, and baby cukes are everywhere, shaded in the lush plants. The onions are growing nice big bulbs, thanks to less heat up here. They're big enough to be using, and will hopefully store well this fall, as I've got about 120 of them planted.

Next year, more broccoli.


 
The beans are growing, finally starting to flower just in the past couple of days. They quickly outgrew and pulled down the bamboo teepees and stuck out there. The ground is so rocky here that it's hard to get any stakes in deep enough to be sturdy.

Next year, stronger trellises and stakes. 

Littlest One planted corn this year. The only year I tried growing corn at the other house, it was a miserable, earwig-infested failure. I'm not sure this attempt will be any better, but it's fun to see her when she goes out and checks on it. It grows quickly, so she sees the changes often.

 Much of what we planted this year is experimenting - trying out new varieties, and growing vegetables we hadn't tried before. Potatoes and cabbage are both new to us, things we didn't have the space for in the past. The cabbage worms are grateful that we've planted so many varieties of brassicas for them to consume. The cabbage heads are big enough now to harvest, though I'm nervous that there are little wormies living inside there that are going to make us not want to eat it.

Next year, row covers.

 In the foreground of this picture are potatoes. I dug a trench as deep as I could go with all the rocks and boulders underground - about 18". I've since filled that back in and hilled up the potatoes another two feet or so, and they're just going crazy. Not sure if there's anything actually growing in there, but they sure are happy plants.

 Next year, potato crates.

And also growing quite well are the turkeys. I'm still fascinated by what neat birds they are. I'm also fascinated by how much they eat. We keep them penned up and feed them commercial game bird feed, and they go through more than I ever thought possible. I'm afraid to let them free range because I've heard it can be hard to get them to come back.
 
Next year, a moveable turkey pen. 


I have a feeling every year will come with a list of things to do "next year". It's all a learning experience. I'm realizing I need to give up my dreams of perfection in these early years while we figure things out. Nothing is ever going to be perfect, of course - this is farming after all. It will get better though, as experience is gained and routines fall into place. Until then, I will try to embrace the imperfection and learn graciously from the lessons this land has to teach me.

The Root Cellar

As far as root cellars go, ours is pretty un-creepy. It's not a scary dungeon built into the ground or anything - it's in the far corner of our basement and is neatly painted white (which makes it easier to see all of the spiders.) It's built with sturdy shelves and even bins for root vegetables. The temperature remains a steady 50-ish degrees year round. Honestly, it's about the nicest root cellar a budding farm girl could hope for.


And, as with many places around the farm, it was filled with "treasures" left behind from the old folks that built the place. It only took an hour of digging and vacuuming and throwing away boxes full of trash to get it all straightened up and be able to take inventory.


There are hundreds of canning jars here, all shapes and sizes. There are even hundreds of rings and some boxes of lids. Now all I need to do is grow enough food and find enough time to make good use of it all.


My meager stores that remain from last year's canning season barely take up one shelf... it doesn't look like nearly as much as it did in the old house, with just the one shelving unit to store preserved goods on.


Two walls aren't shelved... there's plenty of space to experiment with wine- and beer-making, vinegar and cider making, and any other fermenting I decide to attempt in the future.... when I'm feeling a little less overwhelmed!

Coring Pears the Easy Way

Every once in awhile, I come across some utterly fabulous tip for making kitchen work easier. My friend Katie passed this one on to me, and I'm forever grateful!

If you've ever tried coring pears, you'll know that it's tedious work. Of course, it's not bad if you're only coring a pear or two, but if you happen to need to remove the cores from forty pounds of pears, it can be slow going.

Unless you've got a melon baller.

Just cut the pear in half and use the melon baller to scoop out the core. It makes for the prettiest pear halves you've ever seen, and it's about a million times faster than trying to use a knife.

Do feel free to share any other ingenious kitchen shortcuts here - I'm all ears! :-)

The End of the Canning Season

Happily, canning season is coming to an end. Aside from possibly one more box of apples, I've finished all I plan to do for the year. And oh man, is it satisfying to be able to say that!



I haven't written much about canning this year, mostly because it's all the same stuff I wrote last year, and the year before that. Nothing's changed much except that I can kick out jars of canned goodness much more quickly with each passing year.



Here's the list of what's in the "pantry" (read: shelves in the basement. Because I have no real pantry.)

Peaches: 16 quarts
Nectarines: 5 quarts
Apricots: 7 quarts
Pears: 10 quarts
Tomatoes: 15 quarts

Strawberry jam: 16 pints
Apricot jam: 3 half-pints
Apple jelly: 5 pints
Peach jam: 8 pints
Cherry preserves: 3 half-pints
Applesauce: 8 pints

Pear chutney: 13 half-pints
Salsa: 19 pints

Bread & butter pickles: 7 pints
Zucchini pickles: 3 pints
Dill pickles: 3 pints

Apple pie filling: 7 quarts
Apple cider: 4 quarts

I just added it up: 152 jars of food. Wow.

Since peach season in August, I've spent about four hours canning each week, usually a couple of hours on free afternoons, after school is finished and the girls are enjoying some free time (or hang-out-in-the-kitchen-with-Mom time.) It's tiring, but not overwhelming.

And I'm done! We'll have enough fruits, sauces, jams, jellies and pickles to last well into summer next year. Feasibly, all I'll have to buy is bananas. We can snack on canned fruits, have them for breakfasts and desserts all through the winter. I've got about 15 pints of dried fruits as well, which make for lovely snacks.



I'm in the mood for a bit of math. Let's see how much all this food costs to put by. Because math is cool, right?

Peaches - 4 boxes @ $10
Nectarines - 1 box @ $5
Tomatoes - 4 boxes @ 5.50
Pears - 2 boxes @ $8
Apples - 2 boxes @8
Strawberries - 8 pints @ $2
Cherries - 2 lbs @ 1.50
Apricots - free from a neighbor's tree

So about $118 in fruit. All the vegetables I grew in the garden. The costs of the other ingredients I'll estimate at about $50, which seems high except that I use organic raw cane sugar for all the fruit and jellies. That also includes the boxes of pectin, and extra vegetables, spices and such for the salsa and chutney. Figure another $30 for lids for all the jars. So about $200, rounded up, for 152 jars of mostly organic food, or approximately $1.30 per jar.

A jar of organic jam costs $4. Half-pints of chutney sell at farmer's market for $6. A quart of organic canned fruit is almost $5.

I have no desire to do *that much math. But clearly, I'm saving money. A lot of it.

And this food is local! Well, most of it is, anyway. I've talked to the farmers, I know many of them by name. I can ask them whether they spray their crops, or use chemical fertilizers. There's the proof that eating organic and local really is possible, and doesn't have to be that expensive. Is it a lot of work? Well, yes... but it's enjoyable work. It's work that allows for time spent chatting and singing with my daughters or friends in the kitchen, and enjoying the feeling of accomplishment that comes from knowing I'm feeding my family well. And it rarely actually feels like work.

More and more moms my age are canning every year it seems, and I love hearing about it! Wal-Mart sold out of their canning supplies this year, along with most other stores here in town. I think this whole canning/preserving thing is really taking off (for the second time around.)

Notes on Preserving: Frozen Eggs

Wanna see something gross?

Yum... egg cubes!

I realize how nasty this looks (and sounds) but chickens don't lay nearly as many eggs in the winter, and that's not too far off. So I'm trying to be proactive. I looked at many different articles about freezing eggs and settled on this one from Chickens In The Road. The technique is simple - crack the eggs into a colander, smash the yolks, and let the eggs drain through into a bowl. The resulting mixture is then poured into ice cube trays and frozen. Two cubes is about equal to one egg.

Note: eight year old little girls love cracking eggs. Two dozen eggs kept mine happily busy for half an hour.

I don't plan on cooking up a batch of scrambled eggs with these, but I figure they'll be useful in all the winter baking that we usually do.

I've also heard that you can just stick whole eggs in the freezer and then thaw and use them successfully. Has anyone tried that? What other methods for preserving eggs are there - I'm open to suggestions!

Notes on Preservation: Freezer Veggies

Someone asked for some of this information, so here it is.
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One of my goals this fall was to learn to use a pressure canner. It never happened. So, as in years past, I'm working to freeze as many vegetables as I can before the first frost hits.

Vegetables (except for tomatoes) are low-acid foods and cannot be canned safely in a regular boiling water canner. I've heard a few horror stories about pressure canners, and they intimidate me, so I never found the courage (or the time) to learn to use one.

Knowing how much to freeze is a hard thing to master, and I'm still in the process. The one best tip I can offer is to keep records. For each garden season I keep the following records in a 3-ring binder in plastic-covered sheets:

Amount of each veggie harvested (usually noted in pounds with hash marks. You can get a cheap scale at Wal Mart for about $15. I love mine and use it constantly.)

The cost of any produce I purchase from local farmers or stores (so I know if I should wait for a lower price. Keep in mind that the cost of food goes up slightly most years. Don't wait too long and miss the best price!)

The date of the lowest price I've found. Some veggies are only at a really low price for one week out of the summer. Don't miss that week.

The amount I preserve, the method, and the date, and also the date I use the last one. If I use the last bag of diced tomatoes in February, I know I better do twice as many the next year if I want to make it to August.

I also keep notes each year of what varieties of certain vegetables I want to grow again and which ones were disappointing, and I make notes of how many pounds of wild game we're able to put by.

I can't tell you how often I look back at these records. I can tell how much more we're using (as our girls are growing!), what season to start looking for certain produce items, when the best time to go tomato picking is, how many pints of salsa we eat each month... anything I want to know is there in my records. I realize my records sound anal, but they only take a minute or two each night to update, and they are invaluable.

For our family of four, here's what I've got in the freezer so far for this year (some grown, some purchased from local farms:)

14 lbs of green beans (in 3/4 lb packages)
50 ears of corn (cut from the cob, 2 cups per pkg =24 pkgs)
8 lbs of beets (in 1lb packages. I wish I'd planted more beets though.)
18 1-cup packages of spinach, kale, chard, and other greens
5 lbs of kohlrabi (in 1/2 lb packages. It's not our favorite, but it's an easier and more space-effective alternative to broccoli.)
8 cups grated zucchini (I'll do more. It's good for zuke breads and such.)
2 lbs diced bell peppers (I'll do another 2-4 lbs before the season ends.)

I haven't started freezing tomatoes yet - I decided to save that for next week. I needed a break. So I'll write the tomato post then, and carrots will be frozen in the next few weeks, too.

Based on the above totals, I can tell you that we've grown and preserved enough for 6-8 months' worth of soups, stews, stir-fries and side dishes. Hopefully by then we'll have peas and greens and other early veggies coming out of the garden again, and we won't be forced to buy too much from the stores.

I'll try to keep up regularly with preservation notes, since I know so many folks are trying to do this now.

PS - it thrills me to hear how many people are adopting this way of life. Everywhere I turn I'm meeting people who are canning and dehydrating and freezing and buying local, organic produce in bulk. I'm so proud of all of you!

Notes on Self-sufficient eating

Tonight's dinner: wild Nebraska pheasant (procured on our recent trip to the miserable, flat prairie-land of Nebraska) with wild rice and home-grown steamed kohlrabi and carrots.

The carrots are stored in the basement in a plastic tub full of damp sand. This seems to be a fairly useful way of storing fresh carrots, the benefit over freezing them being that we can grate a fresh carrot on our salad even in the dead of winter, or have carrot sticks with our sandwiches. I froze some and stored some fresh this way, and I'm glad for it.

However.

Always wear gloves when digging blindly in a sand bin full of carrots. Not all carrots come through this storage process in as great of shape as we'd like, and grabbing a handful of sand mixed with rotten, slimy, mushy carrot is unpleasant. Really, really unpleasant. At least gloves decrease the gag factor a bit.

Another note: If you're going to be eating wild meat killed with a shotgun, buy a shot detector. How cool is this? It's a miniature metal detector that you use to 'scan' your meat to check for little bits of shot. Side note for those with less experience: a shotgun shell (not bullet, as my husband will surely correct you) is used for killing small game and wild birds. It's a little round packet of tiny little BB's that spread when the shot is fired, thus effective spraying the animal as it tries to get away. Very useful, but it has a tendency to leave little bits of metal scattered throughout the bird that you're going to be serving your family for dinner. The little shot detector thingamajig makes breaking one's tooth a bit less likely. Good investment.

The food I've put by for winter is holding up quite well - I was afraid it would be gone by January, but there should be enough in there to last another few months at the rate we're going. We eat something self-provided for most every meal. The grocery bill is surprisingly low, even for the fairly healthy diet we eat. I'm afraid we're going to drown in apricots if we don't start eating them faster though, and I'm pretty sure everyone will be getting a jar of peach salsa for Christmas next year. On the other hand, we're working our way through the strawberry jam at an alarming rate, thanks in part to the fact that we discovered how tasty it is when mixed with homemade yogurt. It's such an interesting process, seeing how much of each thing we need to have on hand to last a whole year. Some day - maybe - I'll have it all down to a science, with written records of exactly how much of each thing I need to make. Until then, we'll try mixing canned peaches with the yogurt instead, and maybe back off the PB&J's just a little. :-)

What are all my other homesteader/foodie friends doing to keep their bellies full this winter?

Some meal ideas and a couple of recipes

Three months ago, I never wanted to look at my canning pot again.

Okay actually, I still don't ever want to look at my canning pot again. That last hundred and twenty pounds of apples did me in for quite awhile, I'm afraid. But for as much slaving over the hot stove that I did, I'm thankful for it now!

Here's a short list of some of the fabulous meals we've eaten this week, all local and organic and healthy-ish, thanks to the God-forsaken canning pot:
Pancakes for breakfast, topped with canned apples, spiced up with cinnamon and nutmeg, with a side of elk sausage.
Sloppy Joes with ground venison, made with homemade canned barbecue sauce, peppers and diced tomatoes from the freezer, and a side of bread-and-butter pickles.
Homemade polenta topped with a thick meat sauce (ground elk, home canned tomatoes and tomato sauce, peppers, garlic, and basil from the garden.)
Last night's chicken tortilla soup, in a base of homemade duck broth with all kinds of garden veggies.
A roasted wild duck (provided by The Hunter) served with (sob) the last of the kale from the now frozen cold frame.
Steamed kohlrabi and carrots served as a side dish to a ham dinner on New Year's.
Canned peaches on top of vanilla ice cream for dessert.

The challenge at this time of year is figuring out how to use everything I managed to put by, without serving spaghetti five nights a week. It's a fun challenge though, and so satisfying.

Here's a couple of recipes from the list above that really ought to be a part of everyone's repertoire.

Southwestern Sloppy Joes (this is my altered version; the original is from the Cowboy Cookbook by Golden West Publishers.) This recipe only takes about 20 minutes from start to finish (score one for the busy mama!)

1/2 c. chopped onion
1/2 c. diced bell pepper
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1 lb. ground elk (or beef, or venison, or even turkey)
1 cup pureed canned tomatoes
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup barbecue sauce
1/2 cup uncooked oats
1 Tbsp. sea salt
1 1/2 tsp. chili powder
1 Tbsp worcestershire sauce
1/4 lb cheddar cheese, cubed
6 sandwich buns

Saute the onion and pepper in oil in a heavy skillet until soft. Add beef and brown. Stir in tomato puree, water, barbecue sauce, oats, salt, chili powder and worcestershire sauce. Cover and cook over low heat until slightly thickened, about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add cheese and stir til melted. Serve on toasted sandwich buns.

Chicken Tortilla Soup (my own creation based on what I had on hand. Measurements are estimated.) This one also takes about 20 minutes from start to finish.

2 Tbsp olive or grapeseed oil
1 1/2 lbs chicken breast
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped sweet pepper
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 pints duck broth (or, if you don't happen to have wild duck broth on hand, use chicken broth.)
2 cups tomato sauce
1 cup diced tomatoes
1/2 cup chopped frozen spinach
1 tsp. cumin
1 tsp. chili powder
1/2 tsp. oregano
1 tsp. sea salt
8 corn tortillas

In a large pot, saute chicken breast in hot oil over medium heat until cooked through, about 10 minutes. Remove chicken, chop into small pieces, and set aside. Add onions and peppers to the pot, saute til soft. Add garlic and cook one minute more. Add all remaining ingredients except tortillas. Return chicken to pot. Simmer about 15 minutes. Chop the tortillas into 1-inch pieces. Place a handful of tortilla pieces in each bowl, then ladle the hot soup on top of them. Top with grated cheese.

What kind of tasty meals have you been making this winter? I'm always on the look out for more cozy-warm meals to serve my family (especially if they involve using up canned tomatoes!)

A Site to Share

As I'm finishing up with the year's canning, I find myself frequently referencing Pick Your Own - a website devoted to eating fresh, healthy, local foods by preserving them.

I found the site awhile back, when I first started learning to can things. Ever since, I've checked it out for just about every item I put by. Most of the recipes are Ball Blue Book basics, but they're laid out with pictures and tips for making the work easier.

There is also information for processing and freezing pumpkin, zucchini, and most other garden vegetables.

If you want to learn to can, but still think it sounds intimidating, do check out Pick Your Own - it does such a great job of simplifying everything and making it really seem doable.

Garden to Table Challenge - Week Nine

I failed kind of miserably this week on this challenge. Cut me some slack, though - we were on a trip out of town for half of the week and I wasn't doing much cooking. So instead of talking about cooking, I'll talk about canning.

The bulk of this year's garden is just about finished. We're expecting our first frost in another week or so. The beans are yellowing and drying out...



I stopped watering the tomatoes so they'd start turning...



The pretty little garden from early summer is gone, replaced by a well-used, slightly neglected plot of land that's working hard to produce enough vegetables to feed our little family.

The peppers will be picked this week and put into the freezer. The last of the beets will be pickled. Only the broccoli, leeks, and greens will be left to do their best to survive. The cold frame is full of baby kale, lettuce, and greens for winter, and I'm starting to make plans for next year. I still can't believe an entire gardening season is already over! Where did the time go?

But just because it's starting to cool off doesn't mean we won't be enjoying garden veggies. The girls and I have been hard at work saving everything we haven't managed to eat fresh. The shelving unit my sweet husband built for me in the basement is piled high with yummy things that we'll be enjoying in the frozen winter months.



The bottom shelf is where I've stacked the tubs of beets and carrots packed in sand (which seems to be working out well, so far.) There will still be another half-dozen jars of pickles, some pickled beets, and probably more canned tomatoes, along with (hopefully) a couple bushels of local apples.

Here's the running total on canned goods so far:

Strawberry jam: 15 pints
Pickled asparagus: 6 pints
Apricots in syrup: 29 pints
Apricot jam: 5 pints
Tomato salsa: 16 pints
Peach salsa: 8 pints
Peaches in syrup: 10 quarts
Bread & butter pickles: 16 pints
Dill pickles: 8 pints
Whole tomatoes: 12 quarts

Many of the ingredients were grown in our own garden. Most of the rest were purchased from local farmers or gifted to us from neighbors. Maybe next week we'll talk about what's in the freezer... :-)

Are you still harvesting or eating local, fresh produce? Be sure to check in with Wendy at Greenish Thumb to share your successes and read about others' at the weekly Garden to Table challenge!

The Great Carrot Harvest

I finally gave in last night. I just couldn't wait any longer. I pulled out the rest of the carrots that were still in the ground from the three plantings I did this spring.



Oh, it was so satisfying. This was my first successful carrot crop. Pulling carrots out of the ground is downright fun.

After pulling them all out, we trimmed the tops, piled them in a dishpan, and weighed them - seventeen pounds exactly. I'm not sure how many I've already harvested this year, haven't added up the totals, but I think our total harvest for this year is near 30 pounds.



I'll be blanching and freezing the smallest carrots, and any that are broken or damaged. The larger ones will be stored in a container of sand in the basement with the beets and turnips. Well, and a few will be made into carrot cupcakes for little girls. :-)

This one weighed one-third of a pound - there were several of them.
When I planted them I knew they were a short and fat variety -
I guess I just didn't realize how fat!

On Preserving Tomatoes

There are about a gazillion ways to preserve tomatoes for winter. In the past, I've canned them whole, diced, crushed, as tomato sauce, pizza sauce, and salsa. I've also frozen them most of those ways.

Each option has it's ups and downs. Canning is fantastic because it doesn't require any freezer space, and you can stash jars just about anywhere. And if you happen to lose power, your canned goods won't mind. However, the process of canning - boiling tomatoes for nearly an hour - seriously depletes the nutritional value of the fruit. Freezing is just the opposite - it maintains nutritional integrity, but requires space in the freezer and electricity. I do a fair amount of both. I decided to freeze today's tomatoes, because quite frankly, it's too hot to have a ginormous pot of boiling water on my stove for a couple of hours.



Freezing tomatoes is a lot quicker than canning too - especially if you're lazy, like me. Here's a secret: you don't really have to peel tomatoes to freeze them, especially if you're dicing them. Yes, there will be tiny bits of tomato skins in whatever you're cooking, but they aren't really much of a problem.


When I freeze tomatoes, I just core them, cut out any bad spots, and dice them up. Then I freeze them in 2-cup portions in plastic bags. Each little baggie equals the same as a can of diced tomatoes.



(I realize freezing anything in plastic is probably not the healthiest option. But they fit so much nicer in the freezer this way - see?)



When it comes time to use them, you can just toss them into whatever you're fixing (thawed, usually). If you need tomato sauce, put the thawed tomatoes into the blender and whir until smooth. It took about half an hour for me to get these 10 cups into the freezer - totally worth it for the pleasure of vine-ripened organic tomatoes in the middle of winter!

Getting started...

I love this time of year, when the summer crops are just beginning to come on, and I can easily keep up with the preservation of the excess without getting overwhelmed and stressed out.

Every afternoon, I chop a few peppers, dice a few tomatoes, and pack them neatly in the freezer. I might put up a jar of refrigerator pickles or whip up a batch of pesto for the freezer, but I'm not yet having to spend hours slaving in a hot kitchen. This is when food preservation is fun.

The first pitcher-full of pesto ready for the freezer - our version
of convenience food!

I laughed out loud when I read Kristin's post from 2008, because that's exactly what I know is coming. I wait and wait and wait for ripe tomatoes, and then I'll whine and bitch and complain after I've spent six weeks canning tomatoes every afternoon.



For now though, I'm enjoying the little bit of work that comes with knowing we'll be eating garden tomatoes well into the winter. And I'm enjoying the delicious meals that keep finding their way to my table.

Thoughts on preserving

I'm mostly just "thinking" out loud here. Expect some rambling. Feel free to skip this one.

I put up five more little baggies of spinach tonight. Chopping spinach into 1/4" squares is tedious work that doesn't thrill me. Seeing five little bags of blanched spinach go into the freezer does, though.

1/2 cup portions seems sort of odd. I use spinach mainly in soups, pastas and sauces, and occasionally in dips or meatballs. 1/2 cup just seems to be the right amount to add. None of us love spinach, but it's good for us, and adds a bit of something extra, so I use it. I can pull a baggie straight from the freezer and dump it into a hot soup or sauce and it works great.

Last year was very experimental as far as how much stuff I put by from our harvest. Well, this year is experimental too, but I have some idea now of how much I actually need. I'm taking serious notes - I'm weighing and counting everything we harvest and marking it on a sheet in a notebook I keep in the kitchen. I'm keeping a chart of everything going into the freezer, with space to mark the dates we run out so I know how long it lasted, how much will be needed next year. I have tentative goals for some items, especially the ones I can.

Grocery stores are under the impression that food preservation doesn't begin until fall. No one has lids or pickling salt in stock yet. I'm glad I stocked up last fall! I'm still in the early stages of preserving, as little bits come out of the garden and come into season in the stores, but so far I've pickled 6 pints of asparagus, frozen 8 meals' worth of asparagus soup starter, a triple batch of strawberry jam (with plans to do another triple batch tomorrow) and eight little pouches of spinach. Not much, by any means, but we'll be eating primarily fresh all summer, and hey, at least it's a little bit. I'd like to buy another fifteen or twenty quarts of strawberries before the price goes back up, and just freeze them whole. We like strawberries in our smoothies, and I have a great recipe for strawberry bread that I haven't made in awhile.

Standing at the sink tonight, chopping pile after pile of spinach leaves reminded me of just how much work it is to do this, and we aren't anywhere close to self sufficient. Between everything that I make from scratch, everything I'm trying to put by for later, and meals for us to eat each day plus clean up for everything, I spend an easy three to four hours in the kitchen most days - sometimes a lot more. My back hurts, my hands are painfully dry, and I'm glad I'm sitting down now... but I love the satisfaction of it, too.

My "to do list" right now includes canning jam, making pasta, making crackers, freezing (more) spinach, making a big batch of black beans, freezing strawberries... there's more. I know there's more because the list is stuck on my fridge, intimidating me every time I walk into the kitchen. I just can't remember what else is on there at this moment.

Is anyone else out there preserving already? Is there anything I'm forgetting that I should be doing?

Saving Spinach

If ever you feel like you're drowning in spinach, just blanch it all for the freezer and you'll realize how little you really have. :o)

I started with this:


Then I chopped it into smallish bits...



and it looked like this:

The larger bowl is the one in the first picture, too.

(I chop it first because we seem to used chopped spinach more than we do whole spinach. It can be frozen without chopping, too.)

After chopping, I wrapped it in cheesecloth and blanched it for two minutes...

and it was reduced to this:


Three one-half cup portions to go into the freezer. I was almost sad! Three little baggies won't go very far.

On the up side, I'm harvesting that much at least twice a week right now, so I'll have at least a few more batches in there before long.

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On a side note - check out this lettuce! Isn't it beautiful?



I'm having a hard time picking it so we can eat it, because it looks so pretty out there in the garden. I didn't make notes on what varieties I planted, so I'm not sure what it is. I thought it might be Flame (from Baker Creek) but now I'm not so sure. Anyone know?