I’ll Take Sensible

Churnin’. Thanks to Matron for the churn advice!

This post by Matron got me thinking about our food preservation practices and how they’ve evolved over the years.

We put up an enormous quantity of food; strictly on a caloric basis, it’s at least 90% of what we consume, although that’s in large part due to the fact that we’ve largely aligned our diet with what we grow. For instance, we don’t cultivate any grains, and while I can’t say we don’t eat any grains – I make a wicked decent loaf of sourdough bread if I do say so myself, and I do – we don’t eat many. Maybe a loaf of bread and one pot of oatmeal per week, on average. A couple doughnut fixes annually, and pancakes every month or so. We don’t make hard cheese, so we don’t eat much hard cheese; the 10-pound block we recently acquired in exchange for blueberries was the first hard cheese we’d had in many moons. Other than grains, the occasional treat of hard cheese, spices, and salt, I can’t think of food item we regularly buy. Oh, yeah: Honey. We buy honey.

This probably makes us out to be more dogmatic and puritanical than we actually are. The truth is, we eat what we grow in large part because we love the process of growing it, and because we spend so much of our time growing it – time which is therefore not being hawked for the almighty dollar – we have to eat the fruits of our labors. We can’t afford not to; preserving and eating the gifts of our land is part of the ecosystem of our lives, and I can’t even begin to calculate what it would cost to actually purchase the food we raise and process. What with the two insatiable maws of our sons, I’ve no doubt it would literally be in the 10’s of thousands of dollars annually. Ain’t gonna happen, folks.

Anyhow and whatnot again, reading Matron’s post reminded me how we’ve streamlined our preservation practices over the years. We don’t do much canning, anymore – maybe a few jars of tomatoes and some applesauce – having almost entirely turned to lacto-fermenting. This is in part because fermented foods are healthier, and in part because, as Matron points out, canning is one of those tasks that can feel somewhat pesky, particularly in the high heat of late summer.

We ferment kimchi, green beans, grated carrots in ginger, and salsa on an annual basis. We have fermented fiddlehead ferns, broccoli (not recommended), and beet greens. We haven’t lacto-fermented meat (some people do, but it sounds wretched to me), although we do make a goodly amount of dry-cured sausage. Our technique for fermenting goes as follows: Dump the veggies in a jar, toss in a little salt, cover with water, and leave on the counter for a few days or until we get tired of looking at it, whichever comes first. At that point, move to the root cellar. Using this incredibly precise and highly laborious process, we’ve keep kimchi and green beans for more than two years with only minimal loss to mold.

What else? We freeze a ton, and this is definitely the Achilles heel of our preservation practices, if only because it compels us to rely on a precarious and vulnerable supply chain of inputs (electricity, along with the fuels and infrastructure that go into its production) and devices (namely, freezers). But damn is it handy. Right now, there are four freezers in our basement, and each is full: Berries (blue, black, straw), butter (94 pounds and counting), beef, pork, lamb, chickens, and of course Nate’s beaver bits. Oh yeah, and lots of bone broth, which we should probably be canning, but… well, see above.

Making kimchi, circa ’07

We dry a lot. Tons of herbs and foraged stuff like woods nettles and mushrooms and fruit (dried cantaloupe tastes just like mango) and other stuff I can’t think of at the moment. We just finished building a solar dehydrator out of an old sliding glass door a builder friend gave us, but we haven’t had much chance to use it, yet. The ceiling above the kitchen looks like a miniature upside down forest, what with the bunches of stuff hanging from the beams. Every so often, one of them falls on my head when I’m going about my business, and it always scares the crap out of me.

We make bacon and sausage. I smoke the bacon in a hole in the ground, and have never understood why people insist on building (or even worse, buying) those fancy smokers. All you really need to do is dig a hole, find a grate, build a little fire, and cover the whole mess with roofing tin that’s rusted enough that most of the galvanized coating is gone. As you might imagine, knowing me as you think you do, the whole scene – the old tin, the billowing smoke, the wafting scent of brined meat and fat absorbing the gases and fumes – appeals to the hyper-rustic ethos that for better or worse defines so many of my waking hours. Sometimes, I’ll sit by the pit in an old recliner, a cold Bud wedged in my crotch, a 12-gauge across my lap, and a wad of chaw in my lip. Every so often, I’ll yell at the boys to bring me another beer, and you best believe the hop to, lest they invoke my significant wrath.

The yellowfoot chanterelles and hedgehogs are going bonkers right now

Of course, we have the winter greenhouse, which is unheated but in which we sow enough cold-hardy greens to keep us in salads through the New Year. It’s always a slightly sad moment to eat the last salad, or to get the first serious cold snap from which the remaining growth never recovers. But as I’ve written before, if you really want to appreciate something, it’s generally best to do without it for a while.

And with that, I’m outta here. We were ‘sposed to go camping today, but there’s a passel of rain in the forecast, so we pushed it until tomorrow. Which means we’re either wimps, as the boys contend, or eminently sensible. I’ll take sensible.