Recently a neighbor offered me a Lowe’s-sized bucket of apples and a gallon of pie cherries. The former became eight pints of applesauce and the latter a 10-inch pie. At some point that day I got a Facebook message from an old friend; while e-chatting, I learned she, too, was elbow-deep in food preservation that day: tomatoes, corn and green beans.
The coincidence made me grin, especially since her early life goal was to become a big-city journalist and live the single-gal life. (She did become a journalist, but spent most of her career in a small town.)
I asked her if she’d ever pictured herself using a pressure canner, or was that something our moms did. Her response: “We are lucky we grew up the way we did, so we can survive. I rarely shop but when I do it’s only for what I can’t grow myself.”
Those are thoughts I’ve voiced myself. Growing up fairly broke got me through single parenthood and a protracted midlife divorce. Now I’m no longer jobless or broke, but the soaring cost of food (and other stuff) is making me really nervous.
Not everyone is able to (or wants to) freeze, can or dehydrate. But hear me out.
For starters, think about broadening your definition of “preserving” food. In my opinion, bulk buying, stocking up during sales, and combining sales with rewards programs are all ways to “preserve” food. As in, you’re making sure you have the groceries you need at the best prices you can find.
You’re preserving your budget along with the food. The money you don’t spend on grub is money that can go toward other essentials. It’s unlikely that many of us will starve in this country, but a whole lot of people will be mightily inconvenienced, in a couple of ways:
They won’t be able to afford healthy ingredients. When my niece and I were discussing the $7-a-pound ground beef in local stores, I wondered aloud how working people can feed their kids. “Pasta,” she said. “Lots and lots of pasta.” Nothing wrong with noodles, but we need more than starch in our lives.
Sure, people can go vegetarian or vegan. Done right, it’s cheaper than eating meat. But that’s just not for everyone. We omnivores love the variety. And I’m talking about basic healthy stuff, such as fresh fruits and vegetables. One of our supermarkets proudly announced that 18-ounce boxes of blueberries were $9.99 “every day!” Yikes.
They’ll fall behind financially. The more of your paycheck that goes toward food, the less you have to put toward things like debt repayment, saving for retirement and building an emergency fund. Or even toward generally higher prices for things like clothing, gas/heating fuel or auto repairs. (About that last: Consumer Reports quoted an auto shop owner as saying that 10 years ago, the average repair ticket was $1,600. Now it’s $4,000.)
Recently on my Buy Nothing Facebook group, a member posted a “cupboard cleanout” of foodstuffs. One hopeful commented, “I am trying to stretch my budget and I will take ANYTHING.” Several times over the past few months, people have posted that they were almost out of food and payday was still a few days off – could anyone spare anything, anything at all?
I took a bag of groceries over to one of these commenters. He and his wife just had a baby, and rents are sky-high in Anchorage. Pretty sure they’re sky-high in other places, too.
Food preservation: The easy way
As noted above, I include stocking up, bulk buys, and using loss leaders/shopping app combos as “food preservation.” Here are some best-practices tips to help you succeed:
- 12 ways to save money on groceries
- Extreme frugality: Deal eyes
- Rewards programs FTW!
- Putting food by
- Goal-oriented groceries
- Why you need a freezer
About that freezer: Think of ways to use it other than storing ice cream and frozen pizza (or for 24-cents-a-pound sausage deals). For example, you could freeze some of your favorite fruits or vegetables when they go on sale.
Or start checking the “ugly but still good” shelf in the produce section for treasures. In Seattle, I’d buy bags of apples from the remaindered shelf and turn them into applesauce to add to my homemade yogurt. (Or just to eat for dessert.)
Here in Anchorage, we watch for red or yellow Bell peppers on the $1 shelf, then we chop and freeze them for future soups or omelets. Overripe bananas get frozen in chunks to add to breakfast smoothies.
Carrots on sale? Chop and freeze them for future side dishes. Ditto herbs, onions, celery or even overripe tomatoes (which can become spaghetti/pizza sauce later on). Recently when DF found a large onion was starting to soften, he chopped and froze the good parts rather than let them go bad, too.
Food preservation: The low-tech way
DF already had a pressure canner and a dehydrator, and I brought a water-bath canner into the relationship. Also brought some canning jars, couple of jar lifters and canning funnels. Most of these items came from thrift stores or Freecycle.
You don’t necessarily need a water-bath canner, incidentally. Morgan at the Becoming Homegrown blog spells out several ways to get around the purchase of a canner.
I do, however, urge you to get both a canning funnel (makes it much easier to fill jars without spillage) and a canning jar lifter. If you’re lucky, you’ll find these at thrift stores, yard sales or your own Buy Nothing chapter. (Pro tip: You can put out an “ask” for such things, rather than wait and hope they’ll be offered.) Or you can cash in gift cards from those reward programs to buy what you need at Walmart, Target or Amazon. (As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small fee for items purchased through my links.)
We’re trying a new project this year: dehydrating potatoes. Right now we’re using the potatoes we grew. Here’s a fun picture of a Caribe potato that came from our own dirt:
But you don’t have to grow potatoes in order to dehydrate them. Watch for loss leader prices on spuds, or visit the 99 Cents Only store if you’re lucky enough to live near one. Or, again, just buy the potatoes before you need them, at their lowest price, and keep them in a cool, dry place. It’s important to check on them now and then, in case they begin to sprout or (heaven forbid) to rot.
Food preservation: Under pressure
Some foods require a pressure canner. Fortunately DF had two of them, before I moved in. One is a regular pressure cooker and the other is a gigantic pressure canner. The former represents one of his stirring tales of thrift: Some years back there was a many-days-long power outage in his neighborhood, so he took all the meat and fish from the freezer and used the pressure cooker to preserve it in jars. He couldn’t stand to see it going to waste.
The big pressure canner holds a ton of pints and a fair number of quarts. We use it to can not only vegetables but also chicken, turkey and salmon. Having shelf-stable protein is a a great convenience because we can quickly turn it into soup, stroganoff, meat and gravy or, if I’m feeling generous, homemade turkey or chicken pie. Those pies are labor-intensive but so tasty that it’s usually worth all the whirling and howling in the kitchen.
More to the point: We can turkey and chicken when they’re at rock-bottom prices, which means we’re still paying that price when we eat them the next month (or the next year). Salmon is free, because if you live in Alaska long enough someone is going to offer you some fish.
Shoring up the food budget
The National Center for Home Food Preservation is a gold mine for beginners and seasoned food preservers alike. It offers loads of info on not just canning but also drying, freezing, fermenting and other food-saving options. Bookmark the page.
Again, I know that not everyone is able to do this in a big way. We’re not exactly living on the stuff we put away. But it’s surprising how much we can get out of a basic back yard, and how many jars and bags we’ve stuffed onto shelves and into our freezers. Here’s what we grew this year:
Apples: We froze some for pie, canned applesauce, dried some and used the cores to make apple juice
Raspberries; about three dozen quarts are in the freezer and I also made pectin-free jam (found the recipe on the NCHFP website)
Golden raspberries; all eaten fresh, these are a new treat for us, thanks to an acquaintance who was clearing out her back yard for a deck expansion (some day I hope to have enough to turn into jam)
Tomatoes, mostly heirlooms like Cherokee Purple and Black Prince (all eaten fresh)
Strawberries (none of which were preserved they’re too delicious to cook)
Peas; we tried a new variety called Sabre, which guarantees 7 to 10 peas per pod, from Renee’s Garden Seeds; next year we’re doing all Sabre because they’re delicious as well as prolific (as a Renee’s Garden Seeds affiliate, I receive a small finder’s fee for sales made through my link)
Rhubarb (frozen, turned into fruit leather and jarred as compote to add to yogurt; DF also bottled some rhubarb juice to drink as a tonic and to use in those delicious pompion pies)
Garlic (we also chopped and froze the scapes)
Asian greens (planted probably eight years ago, these have gone feral and pop up everywhere)
A frozen raspberry/rhubarb/blueberry mélange that makes one of the world’s best pies; the blueberries came from Costco but again, it doesn’t matter whether you grow these things or not – what matters is getting them at the best possible price
English cucumbers, also from Renee’s Garden Seeds; they flourished in our greenhouse and although we ate a lot of them fresh, we had plenty to use in a cucumber relish that’s amazingly simple and amazingly good
Carrots; since we’re still using up last year’s jars, we’re going to root-cellar these and eat them fresh
Potatoes; we got about 45 pounds from five beds and containers (if you’ve never had freshly dug potatoes, you will be amazed at the flavor and creamy texture)
Celery (all of which was chopped and frozen, although I did put a few leaves into summer salads)
Lettuces (all eaten fresh, obviously)
Spinach (ditto)
Pumpkins – and we just found out that the leaves are edible, so next year we’ll be dehydrating the young foliage
Will this feed us all winter? Of course not. But if things get really bad, we’d get serious about growing a lot more items. That would include cabbage, since DF grew up with sauerkraut crocks. Hope it doesn’t come to that.
Okay, readers, your turn to share: What foods do you put by? Got any clever tricks to share?
Enjoyed this post.
I wish I could say I was clever — but honestly, I usually just cut fruit up (don’t even bother to peel it) and bung it in the freezer as-is. This works very well with peaches, apples and plums. I use them mostly-frozen in pies and crisps. Sometimes if I’m planning jam but don’t have time to make right then, I’ll put the fruit in the freezer too…then pull it out in the winter. Warms the kitchen and makes it smell good, as well.
This works for tomatoes and okra, as well as pesto and chopped greens — I do blanch green beans quickly before freezing.
I do remember hours and hours helping my mom can peaches and tomatoes. And they looked beautiful when done. But I have just as much success freezing everything. (Okay, this does fill up our freezer space, though.) Why make it harder, when I don’t have to?
I remember long, hot hours in the kitchen as well. If freezing works, I say go for it.
Hey there! The last couple of years I have balked at the cost of onions when they go to over $1 a pound (ouch). I now buy a 50 pound bag at our local “kind of discount” farmers market store – When I pay $12 or less for that 50 pound bag, or even when it costs me $18, I am well ahead of the cost per pound on the shelves right beside. I have dehydrated them (on the porch, very fragrant !!!) when feeling energetic (or they were starting to go bad). I have eaten more of them than I otherwise would, having discovered that I LOVE onions when I do stirfries or other dishes. I have enough friends and kids that they don’t go bad.
I am also keeping an eye out for discounted big bags of apples, this year I JUST got a 50 pound bag of imperfect carrots sold for horses and such, it is in the basement and I am focussing on getting them canned and dehydrated. $11 for 50 pounds is a super deal! I might feed more to the chickens than I would of the primo $1.50 a pound carrots, but even that way the food isn’t wasted, just converted into eggs, LOL.
I grow a lot of tomatoes and peppers (mild and hot) in my big greenhouse. This year I have been giving more away, yet still have canned 7 quarts of juice/sauce and 9 pints of salsa. The main crop is still a week or 10 days away from arriving, I will get several rubbermaid bins to can ‘whole’, and make more salsa. I grow tomatillos and those babies can get REAL productive. I roast them and can them for later sauces/salsas.
Ingredients rather than finished products works better for my fall chaos time, making salsas now is. sometimes too time consuming! I dehydrate a lot of my peppers, and this year will be chopping and freezing more of the mild types, as well as researching ways to save the chiles for future meals (Might be blistering them and peeling them and then freezing…).
I have a few eggplants growing, and a favourite Indian-style pickle that is worth the many many chopping hours to make, so I hope to find the time soon as the eggplant need to be harvested.
Kale stays good for most winters in the field, chard not so much, so I likely will be harvesting most of that within the next 2-3 weeks and blanching and freezing to cook up with a bit of balsamic or feta in the deep winter. I have more kale and chard babies planted (hoping for a mild winter to keep the chard alive) but realize that I don’t really have enough. I think I will plant some of my starts (of which I have ‘too many) in the greenhouse as I pull out peppers and tomatoes, they will be protected however keeping them watered might be a challenge as my hoses don’t like being left out…
I won’t have many apples this year, may get more locally but our cold wet wet wet spring wreaked havoc on pollination, so I will make and can applesauce as I get my hands on fruit, that is a favourite with my two younger adult kids.
Jars and lids have been in short supply so I am grateful that I have hoarded and collected and been gifted a lot of jars, and resisted the urges of some of my friends/ family to reduce the supply – COVID canning put a real pressure on jar supplies, and I have been able to gift some to others in need. As for lids, I have made a habit of keeping at least a dozen boxes of each size on hand. When I got a bad feeling 3 years ago, I increased that number and I have been VERY grateful for the foresight as they were impossible to find at times. Now, when I find them, I buy 2 or 4 boxes as part of my grocery runs, which has spread out the costs.
This year, exactly a year since I got my hip repaired (thank you modern medicine, and Canadian ‘free’ healthcare) I have had a much more energetic gardening summer. at 3 years (!!!) sober, I also am more energetic overall. This means that my preserving is happening with fewer losses and more joy, and I am remembering to USE what I make, and to make what I will use. No sense making something elaborate if it doesn’t suit our tastes.
Wow!! Good for you. That’s a lot of productive work accomplished And great job on your 3 years of sobriety That’s something to be VERY proud of
Congrats on the Sobriety!!!!!! I know so many that I would love to share your post with. I lost my brother to alcoholism and it still devastates me. You are doing such good and admirable work. God bless.
Envious of your produce prices! Where I grew up they sold “deer apples,” i.e., windfall fruit that people put out for the deer (sometimes in order to get them to come to an area during hunting season). They’re very cheap. My aunt and my stepmom bought them and turned them into applesauce.
Allow me to add my congratulations to everyone else’s in terms of your sobriety. And thanks for sharing your tips.
P.S. There was definitely a lid shortage here in Anchorage a couple years back. People were checking every possible store and they were just plain sold-out. Apparently the companies that make these things had not just more demand during the pandemic but also a harder time getting employees.
I, too, stocked up when I had a chance — using gift cards from my rewards programs, of course. See the above link to “Rewards programs FTW!” As for jars, I have lucked out with Freecycle, thrift stores, yard sales and my Buy Nothing Facebook group. Had so many, in fact, that I wound up giving a couple dozen of the smallest ones to a neighbor who’s a beekeeper and likes to give honey away. Since he’s gifted us three years in a row, at Christmas, I was glad to be able to provide some containers.
Thanks to everyone re my sobriety milestone. One of the gals who went to treatment with me seems to have fallen off the ends of the earth, and my heart is crying.
If you have friends or family members who are struggling, please find Al-Anon to get support and to learn about this pernicious disease. There is too much judgement and not enough education about alcoholism, the old ‘why can’t they just quit drinking?’ question is so ignorant of the reality. It isn’t a disease of no-willpower, thats for sure.
Unfortunately, as I learn more, I see how hard it is for us alcoholics to begin to ask for help. We have to be the ones making the first move, too.
Having folk around with their hands out, though, is priceless, particularly in the early days.
Such good advice! I’m still learning my pressure canner but have water bath canning down. I use my freezer a LOT and purchased a vacuum sealer. I thought I would mainly use it for freezer foods but I have the jar sealing attachment and have stored bulk flour, sugar, spices and rice – we love it! (Tip: storing the number of cups of flour needed to make my favorite bread recipe and sealing it in a mason jar makes bread making so easy, but my advice is not to mix dry ingredients together to store long term as they won’t last as long.)
Hoping everyone is able to stay well-fed!
I use my vacuum sealer for rice and beans and many other dry goods. My pantry is getting more and more added as this inflation ruins our budgets and goals. My step-daughter gets a bag of surplus every time she visits.
This tip is working out amazingly well for me:
If I have leftover soup/stew, I vacuum seal it.
How do you vacuum seal soup without making a mess?
The internet gave me this tip for freezing soup to vacuum seal:
* Buy a vacuum sealer at a thrift store. (I think mine cost around $7).
* Put leftover soup into a vacuum seal bag (I buy mine in bulk on Amazon. About $0.13 each)
* Fold the top over and fasten with a clip.
* Freeze the bag unsealed. (Usually a couple of hours will do it).
* Take the frozen bag to the sealer and vacuum seal.
* Return sealed bag to freezer.
By partially freezing the bags, the soup solidifies, so it doesn’t make a mess.
This process also works with various leftovers — lasagna, stuffed peppers, enchiladas, etc.
This has been a busy week, so chicken stew and lasagna came out of the freezer for easy meals.
We recently found a sale on frozen veggies. I bought about twenty bags and dehydrated them, putting them in canning jars. Wow! Dehydrating saves space in the cupboard!
My freezer is full of hamburger meat and chicken. I also store marked down bread items there (half price or more from the deli if you get there early). I love to can fresh tomatoes because they make the best chili and spaghetti ever. I have lots of frozen squash which I cook first, mash, and put it in freezer bags to store on top of one another.
About the freezer meat…I do spend money on my ground beef, going to a store where the butcher measures out your meat and packs it in freezer paper. I can buy ten pounds at a time which lasts me three months or so. Watch portion size. Chicken I only buy breasts any more. The same butcher will pack them individually and they freeze well. I meat buy every 3 months and budget for it. I like sausage but can get that locally.
Again, I do not buy snack food or junk which in my opinion includes deli meat. I put oatmeal in canning jars also, not liking the cardboard container. Put pasta in air tight containers, not the plastic that it comes with. I transfer most food I buy in cardboard or plastic to glass containers. It will last longer. Do not buy pasta with eggs if you plan to store it.
Massive failure! I tried container gardening this summer, but due to drought and protracted heat with lots of wind, I did not fare well. Next year I will have raised garden beds which I hope will work.
I would never have thought of dehydrating frozen vegetables! Learn a lot from the readers.
the wonderful dehydrating site is well worth going down the popcorn and a movie night video rabbit hole, she taught me a LOT about what you can and can’t do. Utah mormon lady, so sad she lost her husband a few years back. Her kids now are mostly grown and helping her with her business – she shows you how to fill your dehydrator with frozen veggies, then shows you how to USE some of what you dry.
the site is dehydrate2store dot com.
That sounds promising. Thanks!
I tell people all the time “the freezer is your best friend”….I freeze stuff all the time, and when with close friends for meals, they always send me home with food….because they have listened to me say “oh you can freeze that” so many times! 🙂
No farm for me. I didn’t even have tomatoes this year.
I do watch out for when meat is really cheap though. I brown ground beef and freeze it in one pound bags. I feel rich when I come home dead tired and know that spaghetti is halfway made. I will pressure cook two chickens (sequentially not both at one time). One will be chicken salad and chicken soup. The other will go in the freezer for soup, white chili, taco filling, etc.
I will buy an extra turkey when it is a loss leader.
Love all of the ideas in this article. I do some already but nice to learn more and hear someone’s practical approach to life. Please continue to do similar stories !
It was so kind of you to bring a bag of groceries to that family.
I love all of your tips. I probably won’t ever bother learning to can, but I am very diligent about following the loss leaders at two major grocery chains near me. Just today, the last day of the current week’s sale, I was able to snag the limit of 12 on bags of frozen veggies priced at $.77 each.
Another, albeit unintentional, way I am able to get extra food stores is by volunteering. I volunteer when able at a local monthly mobile food pantry. At the end of the event, they often have lots of leftover items. The items they have change every month. Anyway, they are able to store some shelf stable items back at their office, but they don’t have a lot of room and they have no way at all to store any refrigerated or frozen items. So, they’re usually begging the volunteers to take some home and/or share them with others.
This week they had loads of 50 lb bags of carrots and 40 lb boxes of sweet potatoes left. I took one of each, kept what I knew I could reasonably store & consume at home, and offered the rest to neighbors. Most of it actually went to a neighbor down the street that has a couple of horses and some chickens. Some of the produce was already starting to turn a bit so it was perfect for the animals.
In the past from volunteering, I’ve also come home with a couple of cases of canned spaghetti sauce, a couple of cases of peanut butter, and oatmeal, just to name a few.
I envy your deals! Food purchase options are fairly limited up here.
Oh, and this week I was also able to snag, at a different grocery store, half gallons of milk and orange juice for $.99 each, up to a limit of five each. I have them in my spare freezer.
The last time this particular store had this same sale on milk, I spotted half gallons of milk on clearance, which meant they were half off the sale price, so I got them for only $.49 each! I was over the moon! They went right into the freezer when I got home. I just have to make sure I give them plenty of time to thaw out before they’re needed, because my husband gets cranky when there are icy chunks in his milk!