"Just like the Pioneers" -- Food Storage

I was telling a friend about what we're eating; nearly out of stored winter vegetables, spring vegetables not in yet, and he said, "just like the pioneers". Of course, not quite. If we get too hungry, I CAN go to the store, we CAN go to restaurants. We're really not "hungry", we have plenty of food, it just takes a lot of ingenuity to keep presenting the same vegetables and fruits in new ways.

I have certainly learned the lesson that I need to put up food in the summer and fall, to have enough to last over the winter. The pioneers did that, of course, in a variety of ways before the advent of canning: by root cellaring, by drying, by smoking, by pickling and salting. They harvested their animals in the late fall, and counted on the winter cold to keep the meat from spoiling.

Next summer: I'm putting up tomatoes and tomato sauce; green beans, peas. I'm drying peppers, tomatoes, herbs, onions.
I'll be making some more lactofermented pickles; we just ran out
of cucumber pickles, darn it! Three 1/2-gallon jars at least, next summer. And some wonderful lacto salsa with the fresh tomatoes and peppers. I have a bit from last summer, still good in the frig after all this time. It's truly amazing how well the lacto pickles store in the frig, when carefully prepared.

As local eaters, we're looking at methods of food preservation that many of our mothers and grandmothers used, to save the local bounty of fruits and vegetables for winter. I have been taking a Food Storage online class from Sharon Astyk. She has made a lot of her information public on the internet to everyone. So I'm sharing it with you.

Food Storage 101 Part I
Putting Up Your Own
Growing or Buying Fresh Food for Root Cellaring
What Food Storage Can and Can't Do
and for a few chuckles:
Screwing It Up - A Manual for the New Home Preserver

And there are more, if you're interested: just go to her site and click on "Categories: Food Storage".

It's not a bad idea to have some food stored "just in case", aside from supporting local eating. Just in case you lose your job; just in case you are snowed in; just in case they announce a flu epidemic and ask everybody to stay home. It's nice to look in your pantry and know that you have enough to feed your family for a few months, or a year. We hope we don't see Hard Times, but it's good to be prepared.