Food Storage Friday - The Headcold Edition

We've been a bunch of sickies this week- just annoying headcolds for myself and our temporary roommate but the Russian has been really sick and it turns out he has pneumonia. Which means there's been a lot of soups and teas on the menu this week. And since the weather's been lousy and I'm not feeling so great, I haven't done any shopping at all. We did a pork roast on Sunday so there were a couple days of leftovers and some nice pork stock to which I added bacon, brussel sprouts and kale. A big pot of homemade chicken soup lasted a couple days as well. The last of the greens from the garden, some homemade pierogies and pork paprikish rounded out the week. The most processed thing we ate all week was probably the sour cream!


One thing I noted this week is how depleted my medicinal herbs are! I managed to forage some rosehips which I've been adding to hot lemon with ginger, honey and cayenne. I have fresh sage and thyme but I have no slippery elm bark for coughs and a lot of the other herbs are either depleted or too old to be any use. Looks like a trip to the herbalist is in order. I don't know if my usual trusted cold remedies may have been able to prevent the Russian from ending up as sick as he was but having to make a trip to the ER is something we both prefer to avoid. If you aren't already sick when you get there you're sure to be exposed to a lot of ugly germs!

As for me, in addition to feeling physically sick, I'm also a bit sick of canning. I have one last batch of tomatoes and some apples to deal with and then I think I need a break, at least at home. Thankfully the growing season here is all but done so there's not much left to can anyhow. The preserving workshops I teach are scheduled to go till mid Nov and I'll still need to do some pickled beets for us once we've had a frost but at the moment I'm longing to be finished. And when I need something else to keep my hands busy, there's a whole lot of yarn waiting patiently for knitting season to begin!

Food Storage Friday - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

So it was an up and down kinda week. It started on a high note, being Thanksgiving and the most perfect weather imaginable and it could't help but go downhill from there. My intentions to eat unprocessed were also a bit like a roller coaster- we had some highs, some lows and a bit of inbetween- here's the round up.

The Good:
Preserving continues- this week I did more tomato sauce, tomato salsa, tomato jam (sensing a theme here?) and red onion jam.


Last week's drying experiments all seemed to work out well so there are more trays in the oven and more jars filling out the shelves.
The most fun and interesting projects are the vinegars. I love having science experiments in the kitchen! I used the last of the white grapes, a bag of frozen purple grapes and some homegrown cider (from the apples I picked on Sunday) and set them to ferment on top of the fridge- all are bubbling like mad as the yeasts go to work on them. The screw caps are only loosely on; the gases produced as the sugars ferment into alcohol must be able to escape or they'd blow up!



The bad:
Thanksgiving was a chance to go to two different turkey dinners- one on Sunday and one Monday. I had no say in the preparation of either turkeys (as it should be when one is a guest) and could only contribute sides. For Sunday I prepared two pumpkin pies, made from whole pumpkins which I roasted and pureed, and homemade pastry made from store bought flour and lard- we'll call that one a draw.


For Monday's dinner we shopped at the Sorauren market for local veggies in the afternoon and prepared a roasted cauliflower dish, a root vegetable casserole featuring local carrots, beets and kholrabi, and baked sweet potatoes.


But at the dinner I also indulged in store made veggie and dip platter, cheese and crackers, pumpkin cheese cake, and gravy made from a packaged mix among other things. All of this was lovingly prepared by my sisters who spent the better part of two days preparing to feed a large group of people. In our family of 13 kids, we were brought up to eat what is put in front of us, and it is not good manners to critique someone else's food choices while scarfing them. Count this as a delicious fail.


The Ugly:

The Russian and I both worked a long physical day yesterday. When we got home at 9 pm neither of us felt like cooking. We still had some leftovers we brought home from Monday's dinner and hot turkey sandwiches seemed like the perfect solution, except we had no bread. I sent the Russian to the corner store and this is what he came home with:


Yeah that's Wonderbread. The epitomy of processed food. We weren't even allowed to eat this when we were kids- my mom had the sense to recognize that the amount of sugar and refined flour in it exceeds any possible nutritional value so we never bought it, even on sale. But if you're hungry and this is what's available, you eat it. Which is why things the October Unprocessed kinda bug me sometimes. It's all well and good to talk about eating unprocessed foods but many people just don't have access to these kinds of choices. Did you know if you get your food from a food bank KD (Kraft Dinner mac and cheese) is considered a protein source? And Beefaroni is both a protein and a vegetable source. I'm not suggesting this is a good thing by any means but choosing not to eat those things and then being smug about it seems a bit holier-than-thou sometimes. Most food banks can't provide perishables like fresh vegetables or dairy. And if you have to chose between paying rent or buying fresh veggies, which do you chose? Our weekly Farmer's market is full of locally grown, mostly organic crops but I sometimes can't afford to shop there. I know how lucky I am to have the time and the know how to make much of my food from scratch but if I had kids to think about, I know my priorities would change in a heartbeat. I know at least one participant in this challenge (Canadian Doomer) has small children (and a lean food budget) so her efforts to keep to it are much more impressive than mine.

Today find me in a bit of a riled up mood- this weekend has two major protest events going on in the Toronto area. Tomorrow,Oct 15th, the Occupy Wall St movement moves north to Toronto and Montreal among other Canadian cities. I haven't decided yet if I plan to attend. I support the idea of people making their voices heard and there are certainly many issues in this country that need to be addressed. However the lack of a unified message is troubling and the city as a whole is gearing up for this like it will be a repeat of the disasterous protests that occurred during the G20 summit last year.

Sunday's rally has a much clearer purpose and purposes to be an amazing event- Foodstock is a fundraising gathering to protest the building of a mega quarry in the heart of Ontario farmland and will feature over a hundred of Canada's top chefs serving up local fare accompanied by a program of great Canadian bands- all for a minum donation of $10. This event I'll be attending rain or shine!


But back to Wonderbread-we eat so little bread in this house that I've never bothered to bake our own. Last night made me realize that having a homemade loaf of bread (or even an unbaked one) in the freezer for just such times might not be a bad thing. Anyone have a good beginners recipe for bread?

Food Storage Friday

Back in March we participated in a Pantry Challenge, a month long experiment of trying to eat entirely from the food we had on hand without buying any more. This month there's another challenge, called October Unprocessed. The idea is to try to avoid using any kind of processed foods for the entire month and my fellow Pantry Challenge participants Canadian Doomer and FarmGal are playing along. I decided not to do the full challenge for a number of reasons but since I support the idea behind it, I'm aiming to add a few thoughts of my own periodically. Everyone has different definitions of what constitutes unprocessed - for example I would never buy things like premade pastry and I make my pumpkin pie from actual pumpkins, not canned, but I'm not about to grind my own flour to make pie crusts with!

The Russian and I are a DIY household on many fronts- partially because we like the experience of making things but also because we often have more time than income. Challenges like these are interesting for me because they draw attention to things we may not have considered and often provide ideas of how to do things better. The Pantry Challenge was a great example of this and one of things I quickly became aware of was how dependent we are on our freezer for much of our food storage. As this blog demonstrates, I do a lot of hot water bath canning but the majority of it is condiments and sauces. Gayla Trail of You Grow Girl calls it "Junk food for the Apocolypse" which is a fairly accurate portrayal. In a pinch it's somewhat nutritious food but not exactly the kind of meals that will sustain us for long. Not having a pressure canner means I don't have the ability to preserve any type of meat or low acid veggies in jars. Soup is also out unless is frozen. But being dependent on the freezer means we are also dependent on electricity and even in Toronto that can be an issue at times. In the Blackout of 2003 I was lucky- my block was on the same grid as a nearby hospital and we had power restored in under 6 hours and everything in my freezer survived. Others areas of my neighbourhood didn't see power for 3-5 days during one of the hottest Augusts on record! In 2009 we lost power for 3 days in the dead of winter and had to put the contents of the freezer in a cooler outside; everything survived thanks to the cold temps. We only have the usual sized refrigerator freezer but even that small space contains a good portion of our stored food, in the form of soups and stocks, fruit and vegetables, fresh meat and homemade prepared food like pierogies and gnocchi. To lose power for any length of time could mean the loss of a considerable amount of food. Finding alternate methods of storing food is frequently on my mind.

One the things that I wish was possible in a apartment is access to a root cellar or cold storage. I grew up with one in my chidhood home and my dad still keeps it full of supplies even tho there's only 3 people living there currently. It's been a long standing tradition among my siblings that when you're totally broke you can always visit mom and dad's and 'grocery shop' in the root cellar. It's mostly full of store bought canned goods, my dad's preserves and pickles and some produce but you could probably feed a family of 4 decently for a couple months on what they have on hand. In the apartment we live in now, we are so lacking in storage I don't have anywhere to keep even the smallest amount of pantry supplies outside of the tiny kitchen cabinet space. Even if there were storage options, the lack of temperature control makes it's impossible to keep anything perishable anywhere but the fridge. Last year I tried to keep apples in the sunporch but even tho it's unheated, the temperature remains at or above the temps in the apartment- southwest windows and a blacktar roof keep it toasty all winter! Great for me and the plants, deadly to stored food.

This week the prices on local root veggies are at their yearly best- we picked up 2 x Ontario new potatoes, yellow onions and carrots for $1.67/ 10bl bag each. Red onions were slightly more at $2.99/ 10 lbs but I'm doing some red onion jam this week so we picked those up too. That means there is currently 50 lbs of vegetables rolling around on the kitchen floor and we need to get creative with our storage. Here's one solution we came up with!



We're considering building some kind of insulated wooden storage box to stay outside on the deck. If we can make it raccoon and squirrel proof it might hold us until winter but once the temps go below freezing it won't be viable for veggies.

In the meantime I'm experimenting with another form of food perservation- drying. We don't own a dehydrator but having a gas oven with a pilot light means I have a low cost drying option already built in. In actuality it's free for us since we don't pay for gas here and don't have the option of turning it off in any case. I've used it for tomatoes for years but never bothered to try much else. In the past few weeks I've been trying out other possibilites with some success- onions, both green and bulb seem to work well. Celery leaves dried in hours. Corn dried out okay but whether it will be edible when reconsituted is another story- it might be okay in soup or I may just grind it to corn meal.


I'm attempting to dry carrots for the first time today- given their density I suspect it will take few day so I'm not sure what to expect. The Russian inadvertantly demonstrated that potatoes can be dried this way too- I'd been hesitant to attempt potatoes because I was concerned that they'd turn brown and unappealing but these ones look fine for being left in the oven for two days by mistake! I think the trick here was that he partially cooked them at very high heat then shut the oven off. They're still a bit moist in the centre so I'll finish them at the same time as the carrots.

Along with the dried cherry tomatoes and the beans I grew this year, the shelf is filling with jars of dehydrated veggies. If nothing else at least I have the makings of some good soups!