We spent parts of yesterday and today putting food by. Specifically, we turned seven or eight pounds’ worth of rhubarb into fruit leather.
First we chopped and simmered, then let the soupy stuff drain through a pair of colanders before glopping it into the dehydrator. We saved some of the juice to drink as a tonic; anything that tart has to be good for us, right?
The rest of the juice was frozen into chunks (which I insist on referring to as “Rhubik’s Cubes”) and set aside for my homemade smoothies. Made with free rhubarb and raspberries, marked-down “red band” bananas, half a cup of bulk-bought rolled oats, an egg and a big scoop of my homemade yogurt, these things are cheap as well as healthy. (And since I’m having the second part of my dental implant work done next month, I foresee a few liquid meals in my future.)
The last of the fruit leather finished dehydrating this morning. Like the other batches, it was rolled up inside paper scavenged from two sources: cut-apart cereal box liners and waxed paper saved from my sister’s annual tin of homemade peanut brittle. Flavored with sugar and a bit of ginger, the leather is a tangy, chewy treat that I must stop sampling or there will be none left for winter.
A previous batch of rhubarb had been turned into a compote sealed in pint jars, to be added to future dishes of yogurt. Not sure how many hours it took to do all this, but to us it doesn’t matter. We don’t put a dollar value on our gardening and food preservation, for two reasons:
- We don’t get paid for every minute we exist, and
- We enjoy the process of turning home-grown produce into something we can enjoy next winter.
Some people would rather buy their veggies than grow them. I get that. Not everyone has the physical ability, the time or the real estate to garden. And fact is, the average person buys most of their stuff. We pay someone else to raise meat and produce, bake our bread, sew our clothes, build our homes.
For us, gardening is entertainment – and we don’t have to dress up or drive anywhere to enjoy it. Watching tiny green shoots grow into delicious foodstuffs is a reliable annual miracle. If you’ve ever grown so much as a pot of herbs on the windowsill, you understand what I mean.
Preserving the results is a natural progression. Making raspberry jam, cutting up carrots for canning, picking peas to freeze, plucking greens to dehydrate, slicing beets to pickle, peeling apples to cook into sauce – it’s all fun for us, even when we get tired toward the end.
The greeny smell of dehydrating kale, the sneezy scent of cloves, the sharp bite of vinegar, the soothing aroma of slowly simmering apples all keep us going: This is sustenance. This is satisfaction. This is safety.
About that last: Food prices are going up. On a Costco run earlier this week, DF noted that bread flour had risen 20 percent in the past two months. I didn’t price any of the canned veggies or fruits, but my guess is that they’ve gone up as well. And if the current truck driver shortage continues, the prices of everything will keep going up, up and away.
You bet we’re going to preserve our harvest. Better safe than hungry.
It’s not that I think we’ll actually starve. It’s that I don’t want to spend tons extra on groceries. Who would?
Sharing and saving
Another reason to grow more than we can eat fresh is to be able to share the bounty. It’s enormously satisfying to watch DF’s grandkids eat their way through the raspberry patch, shell raw peas directly into their mouths or clamor for yet another slice of that delicious Chelsea Prize cucumber. They are learning where food comes from, other than a takeout box or a supermarket shelf.
We send whatever’s freshest over to DF’s mom, and invite my niece (a fellow Jersey girl) over for tomato sandwiches. I suppose we could make cucumber sandwiches using those English cukes, but I prefer to eat them with just a sprinkle of kosher salt.
We invite folks to pick raspberries once our freezer and jam quotas have been met. I plan to ask a neighbor over to glean some Red Sails lettuce and then introduce her kids to “finger salads”: a plate of greens and a bowl of dressing, no forks allowed.
But back to putting food by: Once upon a time, Alaskans had big gardens because the cost of getting fresh-ish produce was astronomical. Since containerized shipping became a thing, growing your own vegetables and fruits hasn’t been strictly necessary.
The stuff that comes from our yard is, as they say, “1,800 miles fresher.”
Canning, freezing and dehydrating the harvest does provide a great boost to our budget, because groceries are expensive here. It helps that this is a mature garden that doesn’t cost much to maintain. DF saves seed, repurposes old lumber to build raised beds, and uses gift cards that I get from several rewards programs to pay for potting soil and other items. We already had a ton of canning jars, too, many of which I got from thrift shops, yard sales and Freecycle.
If we were starting from scratch it would cost a lot more – which is why I think some people don’t bother gardening and preserving. The first few seasons are learning seasons, and you could wind up hot and exhausted while harvesting only a few items. Those tomatoes worked out to three bucks apiece! And by the time we paid for the jars, lids, pectin* and sugar, that raspberry jam was probably $10 a pint! Forget gardening and preserving. I’ll stick with Instacart.
Over time, though, gardeners get better at growing and, more to the point, stop assigning a dollar sign to the task. If you went strictly by hours spent working, maybe those tomatoes would be $3 each. Ours aren’t, I don’t think, but even if they were we’d keep growing them because they taste amazing – and again, because it’s entertainment.
It’s great to know that our cukes aren’t coated with “edible” wax and our salad greens aren’t sprinkled with pesticides. We appreciate the flavor of fresh-picked food and, later on, the knowledge that the peas on the plate were the result of our own labor.
Putting food by: It’s magic
Because it is labor, at least until you get everything under control for the year. The other night DF said that everything that could be done outdoors was done. All that was left for us to water if necessary and to stay on top of the weeding.
(Pro tip: Just as keeping your home tidy a few minutes at a time means no onerous weekend housecleaning, pulling a few weeds a day means you aren’t spending hours in the garden on a Saturday that was clearly intended for a hammock, a new book and a glass of lemonade.)
For us, gardening is a source of happiness as well as nutrition. Watching a seed the size of the period at the end of this sentence turn into a healthy head of celery is pretty magical. Freezing the chopped-up vegetable and drying the leaves is more work but it, too, is magic when you look at pantry and freezer shelves and realize, “I did that.”
So consider putting food by, whether it’s from your garden or a local farm or produce auction. The National Center for Home Food Preservation is loaded with information on canning, drying, freezing and jamming. Bought at the lowest prices of the season, that lug of peaches or crate of tomatoes could save you money compared to what you could buy at the supermarket.
Today’s saved rhubarb will become next winter’s skiing snack. DF can tear off a section whenever hunger strikes. Being able to take a few more downhill runs rather than quit for the day will let him take full advantage of that senior citizen weekday pass. The snack will be an antidote not just to hunger, but also to the snow and cold: For just a brief moment, the tart taste of rhubarb will take him back to a summer day.
Readers: Do you preserve any garden produce, or even locally grown stuff?
*You don’t need pectin to make jam; check that NCHFP link for workarounds. And since the stuff costs anywhere from $3.29 to $5.49 per box up here, the savings are considerable.
Related reading:
- Always getting ready
- The low-maintenance preppers
- Looking back at the garden
- Grateful for sun and berries
Not into canning, but I love my dehydrator. I save on cupboard space this way. Caution: get a good book on dehydrating or look up all methods on the internet. I ruined my first year crop of sweet corn by not blanching first. Also, do dehydrate certain things like onions outside or the house will stink a long time!
My friend pressure cans meat, and it is wonderful! Even the toughest cuts are tenderized. She also cans chili, soups, and anything else that she likes.
Raised garden beds are a must! I hired two 15 year old neighbor boys (I’m in my 70’s) to do the building and transporting of soil. I can now garden to my heart’s delight without bending over.
That link to the National Center for Home Food Preservation has info on things like dehydrating and jerking as well as the more well-known canning and jamming techniques. It’s a great resource.
And sweet corn….Sigh.
Pickle relish today and probably Apricot jam in a few days. Need ideas for yellow crook neck squash. Also a lot of onions to chop and freeze. Then the green beans will come in a few weeks. Later tomatoes and peppers for salsa (canned). I do meat when I get too much ahead. Last year when we were stuck in a mandatory evacuation area and I was not sure when propane could get here for the generator, I canned 16 pints of meat so I would have less exposure of frozen stuff. Pressure canner on the camp stove! I need to try the pickled eggs I did last year to see if I want to do more.
During a week-long power failure DF did the same thing with the meat and fish in his freezer, although he used a pressure canner on the gas stove. He hated the idea of losing all that food and he couldn’t possibly eat it all.
Wish we could grow as many warm-weather crops as you. I’d love to do salsa and such.
My aunt used to make really good egg pancakes with younger squash. She would shred the squash, and add it to beaten eggs, then cook small pancake type patties in olive oil using a frying pan. Sprinkle with parmesan and it was so good. Kind of labor intensive but maybe you can shred a bunch to use later so that it’s not a huge ordeal for breakfast.
That sounds really good.
Amy D. used to freeze shredded squash without cooking and use it later to make different things.
I bet she did. You’d have to let it drain as it thawed, I guess — but I would collect that liquid and add it to the boiling bag.
https://donnafreedman.com/boiling-bag/
Or maybe to a bowl of bread dough (we’ve already used potato water and it turned out swell):
https://donnafreedman.com/our-daily-bread/
I’m not a big fan of canning but enjoy making fig and grape jam when our trees and our neighbor’s vines start producing.
We make our own cheese and my husband has a small garden. I will be making batches of tomato sauce when those vines start producing.
The price of everything is going up. It’s good to be able to be even a little self sufficient these days.
I make fig preserves and apple pie filling for glopping into oatmeal or making apple crisps. Both are in my near future, because fruit is ripening quick. In a month or so, it will be peach season. I freeze slices on a cookie sheet and then pop them into baggies. I also make lemon juice or pesto ice cubes sometimes. Right now I have a lot of sauteed swiss chard and pumpkin puree in the freezer from the spring. We are working towards getting the fruit trees and raised beds ready for when we retire and have more time to mess around. This year the dreaded leaf footed sucker decimated my tomatoes. It was very sad, because I love oven dried tomatoes. I must say that fruit leather looks really good. I may end up borrowing my parents dehydrator to try some.
A few years back we had a lot of small green tomatoes when it got cold — too small and hard to ripen up. So we sliced them thinly and dehydrated them to put into soups. When cooked, they tasted really sweet.
Make sure that the dehydrator has at least one plastic screen, kind of a fine-mesh appearance. Once it’s set up pretty well, peel it off and finish it on a regular tray, and spread more fruit pulp on the screen. And so on and so on.
Pro tip: Use a cooking spray like Pam on all the trays, to make them easier to peel off. (We use Kirkland brand.)
I try to put up stuff — but we love fresh fruit so much, we invariably eat it. And there’s the high altitude issue where we live in Colorado — which means you can’t just put a layer of wax on top of the jam, and you’re done with it. (We live in a fifth-wheel now, so I don’t have the room to store a pressure canner for just that.)
But I do grab blueberries away from Husband the Brick and put away three or so bags for blueberry pancakes in the winter.
My Walmart has VERY GOOD sweet corn this time of year. There is no local sweet corn available in Michigan at that time. So at 10 CENTS an ear….I buy 50-60 ears at a pop. Cut it off the cob uncooked, then simmer in a bit of water, salt, sugar and butter….then freeze. Its just as good as fresh when you thaw it out. I cannot grow it for that.
I don’t have luck with carrots here, so when I’m in the mood, I grab a 40# bag of “deer carrots” at the local product stand. They are meant for deer, but they are perfectly fine…just not cute enough for the store. They can up wonderfully.
We don’t get paid for every minute we exist. Donna…that says it all. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard …”I wouldn’t bother, you don’t save any money.” “Not worth my time”. But if I’m sitting home, not working, I’m not making money anyway so what’s the difference??!?! Especially if you learn a skill…they can take a lot of things away from you…but never a skill.
As the song says, “No, no, they can’t take that away from me.”
Where I used to live you can buy deer apples. They’re generally windfall apples, i.e., likely to develop bruises because they hit the ground. But some of my relatives buy them at a greatly reduced price and use them to make applesauce to can.
Ah, Jersey beefsteak tomatoes. Dh loves them and usually has tomato sandwiches on the weekend in the summer.
What part of Jersey? I grew up in Cumberland County, very south.
I know what you mean about the magic of watching a seed sprout and grow into a plant. I feel a great sense of pride when I realize “I did that.” This year, I successfully grew onions, some of which were the size of baseballs. 🙂 LOL! I decided to preserve them by chopping and freezing them. I was so proud that I wrote on the outside of the bag with the note “I grew this one!” And it impacts us financially, too. In the summer here, the price of onions is about 99 cents/lb, but it goes up to about $1.99/lb in the winter. I also grow, harvest, dry, and freeze herbs like rosemary, basil, thyme, and parsley.
DF will be jealous when I tell him. He’s never had much luck with onions. Last year was the first time he was able to grow them at all, and they were not huge.
We will likely try again next year; this year was too busy with Other Things to think about branching out. We’ve got lots of stuff in the dirt, but it’s pretty prosaic stuff.
Unfortunately, they were not all the size of baseballs. LOL My secret with the onions was learning about their need for fertilizer and water, and learned that they need a lot of both. I bought a soaker hose, cedar mulch, cow manure, and blood meal, all of which greatly contributed to some success. The instruction I found said to space out the seedlings to 4″ apart and rows about 12″ apart. The other thing I learned about was long day and short day onions. Good luck on future onion growing. I know I will be doing it again next year. https://www.johnnyseeds.com/growers-library/vegetables/onion-bulbing-daylength-latitude-map.html
I’m so jealous. I cannot grow onions, no matter where in my yard I plant them.
The dehydrated fruit leather you made reminds me of the fruit roll ups that come in individual packaging (environmentally unfriendly, expensive and full of sugar). Yours looks delicious and I’m sure is much healthier.
Well, they do have some sugar — this is rhubarb, after all — but no high-fructose corn syrup. And they’re pretty cheap because the rhubarb and waxed paper are free and the sugar is from Costco.
Just scored an unopened box of waxed paper on our local Buy Nothing group. We are soooo set for my holiday candy-making.
I literally had just finished a tomato sandwich (well, wrap – I put the tomato, mayo, and salt in a tortilla) when I read this!!!
We volunteer at a monthly mobile food pantry whenever possible and did so this past Saturday. There’s usually lots left and the organization has no way to store it, so they encourage volunteers to take what they wish at the end. Long story short, I came home with a ton of gorgeous, perfectly red & ripe tomatoes. I’m enjoying then straight while the other K is making his favorite tomato cucumber salad.
Sounds delicious.
A woman I know scored a TON of fresh produce all summer by volunteering to be the pick-up point for a CSA. Invariably some people did not pick up the boxes, and others would open them and say, “I’ll never eat all this kale/broccoli/whatever — would you like some for your family?”