food preservation
sastyk | May 6, 2010Note: This is the first kind of canning you should try, and the most basic, and IMHO, most useful kind. It is definitely worth experimenting with when you've got an excess of produce, which many people do this time of year. If you don't have your own overproductive garden, perhaps you can offer to preserve some for a friend with a garden, in exchange for some food - and most farmers offer bulk prices if you can buy in quantity. Try shopping at the end of the day, when farmers don't really want to take the food home anyway!
It is starting to be time to think about preserving food. Why…
sastyk | May 6, 2010Note: This is part of a two-part piece on the basics of canning (the whole thing in more refined form is contained in _Independence Days_ as well). In a previous post, I wrote about putting canning in perspective - it is not all of food preservation, nor is it essential. That said, however, I get more questions how how to can than all other forms of food preservation put together, so since my food storage class is doing Pressure Canning this week, I thought I'd re-run essays I've written about how to can. I should note, I ask that anyone who has never canned before (or not for decades -…
sastyk | April 26, 2010I 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…
sastyk | April 14, 2010I still have two remaining spots in my online food storage and preservation class, starting tomorrow! If you'd like to join us you can read about the class and the syllabus here, and email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com to reserve a spot or ask more questions!
Cheers,
Sharon
sastyk | April 5, 2010There is still space in my upcoming (starts April 15) Food Storage and Preservation Online class, for those who are interesting. If you've wanted to start preserving or building up a food reserve and have no idea how to start, or perhaps you learned to can once upon a time, but want to explore the full range of food preservation options, or you've joined a CSA and want to know what to do with all that food you are getting, or cut your grocery bills - this is the class for you. Each class includes a couple of practical projects for you to try out each week.
The class is offered…
sastyk | March 25, 2010I've had a lot of people ask when I was going to run food preservation and storage again, and ta da! I am. I'm doing it as a six week course, run asynchronously online on from April 15 to the end of May. I'll put material up on Thursdays, but you can participate at your leisure.
The class will cover everything from the very basics of setting up a food reserve to more advanced food storage, the reasons for storing food and water, how to handle medications and special diets, deal with kids and elders, and how to save money doing it. We'll also cover all the major food preservation…
sastyk | March 1, 2010
Note: Most of the Independence Days material will run at ye olde blogge , but I wanted to post the year three start up over here too, since my readership isn't entirely overlapping. If you want to post status updates, the weekly thread for that will be at my other blog, but you can sign up here too! I hope you'll join us!
Many of us need nothing in the world so much as more time. Adding new projects is exhausting - and stressful. And yet, we know that there are things we want to change - for example, most of us would like to grow a garden with our kids, or make sure that we know where…
sastyk | February 15, 2010I imagine after the last few weeks, the idea of storing food isn't seeming quite so crazy to a lot of folks in the country, but still, I hear all the time "I want to start building up a reserve but my husband/sister/mother in law thinks this is nuts." So I thought I would repost this piece, on how to get your family on board (and what not to say).
Ok, I've convinced you - you need a reserve of food, you want to learn to can and dehydrate, you want to start eating more local foods. But you haven't done anything yet, because, well, the rest of your household isn't on board. Before you go…
sastyk | February 13, 2010The jars are emptying out here. Despite the fact that it was an unbelievably awful gardening year, somehow the canning jars filled up all the same, to the point that we actually ran out of pint and smaller jars. Now, boxes and cabinets are filling up with emptied jars, put away until I begin putting things up again.
I still dig out the canning kettle once in a while in the winter - some apples going slightly soft inspire some applesauce now and again, but the season of preservation has not yet begun, and the time of emptying is upon us. Every day, our stocks decline.
Every year there is a…
sastyk | January 18, 2010The definitive book on root cellars and the cold storage of vegetables is Mike and Nancy Bubel's _Root Cellaring_, and I'm very fond of this book. Over the years, we've relied on it for all sorts of things, and it has helped us find a spot in our house suitable for natural, unrefrigerated cold storage of our produce. It is a wonderful and extremely useful book.
We keep apples, potatoes, carrots, quinces, cabbages, brussels sprouts, pears, onions, beets, celeriac, parsnips and other vegetables on our porch for months - and that means that we mostly eat locally during the winter, and that we…