canning
sastyk | June 7, 2011This year will be interesting - we anticipate adding two or three more people to our household (and maybe more - we're gently looking for a housemate or two once things settle down with the foster kids). In past years I've mostly been able to keep up with the "every year the kids get bigger and eat more" growth needs, but this ups the ante in several ways - besides adding more mouths to feed, we anticipate that the first few months we'll be pretty focused on the kids, with less time for garden and preservation than usual.
I could let some of it go - just accept that this year less will be…
sastyk | May 25, 2011It seemed up here in the north that spring would never come - and now we're headed rapidly into that time of year when everything is ripe and abundant in our gardens and at local farms, and learning to put food up can make it possible for you to enjoy summer in winter, and continue eating locally as long as possible. It can be overwhelming when you start preserving, so if you'd like a friendly voice to walk you through it, please join us, starting next Tuesday!
The class is on-line and asynchronous, and you can participate at your own pace. Every week we'll have projects involving what's…
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 | 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…