Sometimes You Just Gotta Bear It

In addition to my rather unhelpful advice that the best way to keep smiling during food processing is to keep smiling (wow, thanks a lot, Hewitt. Now there’s a real piece of genius), I offer the following:

1. Forget canning. Way too much fuss and bother. Pretty much the only thing we can anymore is applesauce, and only every second year. Fermenting is eons easier, uses zero energy, doesn’t make you sweat like scalded cat, and takes a fraction of the time. Healthier, too, by a long shot. Honestly, I can hardly fathom the fuss of canning anymore.

2. Plan wicked smart. As in, don’t kill and cut pigs in the middle of July when there’s a quadrillion other things going on. I mean, really: What sort of goob would do that? Oh…

3. Get help. For us, that mostly means enlisting the boys, particularly now that they’re at the age when they can contribute in a meaningful way. Sometimes, we have help from friends on larger tasks (cutting meat, for instance).

4. Prepare the night before. For instance, when we make sausage, I always get the grinder set up and mix up the spices the night before. When we make kimchi, we set up our “work station” the day before. It’s a small detail that makes a big difference.

5. Music. Gotta have it. Loud and fast as Penny will tolerate. Which ain’t very. But you do what you can do.

6. Don’t stress. Assuming you’ve planned for abundance, it’s not a big deal if you don’t every last freakin’ pea shelled or every last ‘tater dug. For obvious reasons, you don’t want to go wasting a bunch of food, but don’t go losing your cool over it. Often, once we’ve reached our quota, we’ll invite friends to come harvest whatever remains.

7. Get your storage organized well ahead of time. For instance, we do our annual freezer clean-out in late spring/early summer, when they’re as close to empty as they get. We work real hard to be sure we’re not piling this year’s stores on top of last years’. Ditto for the root cellar, which is due for its annual hoeing out right about now.

8. Also, have your packaging figured out and set up beforehand. Nothing more frustrating than having to scramble for butcher paper in the middle of a hog. And don’t be afraid to experiment. For instance, for pesto, we’ve learned that the most space-efficient way to store it is to first freeze it on cookie trays in cup-size “pancakes.” Then we transfer all those pancakes to a two-gallon freezer bag. It’s quick, clean, and makes the most of precious freezer space.

9. Know what you need. We’re constantly adjusting the quantities of the foods we put up in relation to our shifting needs. For instance, we used to ferment a whole lotta salsa. But over the years, our appetite for lacto-fermented salsa has been on the decline. We always keep track of what we put up, then we pay attention to what’s left over from the year prior and adjust accordingly.

10. Don’t be a freakin’ wuss. Because the truth is, sometime you just gotta grit yer teeth and git r dun. I say this only partly in jest, because I’m pretty sure that most of us (myself most definitely included) have gotten a bit soft when it comes to the gritty realities of providing for ourselves. Truth is, processing food is a lot of work, no matter how big a smile you got pasted across your mug or how much time you spend remembering that it’s a reminder that life is in fact not the least bit boring.

Truth is, sometimes you just gotta bear it.