Connecting the Path: The Food Storage Year

I'm engaged in rediscovering the skills that our foremothers knew: how to store food for the winter and spring until the next harvest, and using stored food to feed their families. Very interesting. When you don't think in terms of driving to the nearest grocery store and buying foods shipped from all over the world, it requires a little more advance planning.

I've been busy "puttin up" since last summer; snap peas, English peas, green beans frozen in June; July and August lactofermented vegetables: green beans, cucumbers, various kinds of coleslaw. Then in August started the fruit: apricots, peaches, nectarines, plums, prunes; canned in light honey syrup, dried in pieces or as rollups. Our early apples, very small crop, went into jars as sauce or dried. Then in September, the tomatoes! Sauce, juice, chopped, stewed. Apples and herbs dried; broccoli frozen.

And I've been gradually putting staples into half-gallon Mason jars. California brown rice in the garage (to stay cool). Beans, lentils, split peas from western U.S. growers. Wheat flour in the freezer. Wonderful Colorado millet and quinoa, buckwheat and kasha and popcorn from western U.S. A box of apples in the garage, separated by a reasonable distance from paper bags of potatoes; a case of mixed winter squash in a cool room.

Now comes the second challenge: Eat what you store. That's the food storage year:
* Store what you eat
* Eat what you store


In some ways, it's easier for me to just store and store, pack-ratting away foods that we like, feeling a sense of accomplishment looking in the freezer and into the boxes of gleaming jars. But... it's food! Precious indeed, but perishable. Whole grains keep a good long time, but beans get tired after a few years of storage. Frozen food gets freezer-burned. Canned fruit loses some of its flavor. The apples and squash and potatoes are fresh foods, good keepers, yes, but not forever.

So, now's the time to stop stocking up, and start using what I have stored. I've already gotten into the frozen snap peas; they turned out well using the vacuum bags. And I've started using the tomato sauce for pasta and pizza; very nice flavor. Muir Glen canned organic tomatoes are fine, and I've certainly used cases of them through the years, but my home-preserved sauce from Colorado tomatoes is especially good.

We've been eating the millet (me), the buckwheat, the gluten-free oats, the whole-grain wheat flour (DH), steadily. I just finished eating my way through the 50 lbs of Colorado organic millet I bought last February. Now I'm starting on the 25 lbs I bought through the coop in April. I love it, and generally eat it once a day; could be breakfast, lunch, or supper.

One secret to the successful food storage year is good record-keeping. I'm making an inventory of what I've stored, along with the date of storage. I'll make it a point to use the oldest first. (Blush: I found seven jars of applesauce from 2007; they'll go first). As I use something, I'll check it off the list. If I run out, and have to buy something before the next harvest, I'll note it.

By next summer, I'll have a much better idea of how much, and what kinds of foods we need to get through the year.

I also need to get into my cookbooks and find recipes that fit the foods we have. Oftentimes we have simple meals: meat, two veg, fruit for dessert. Now that winter is nearly here, I need to start making more soups and stews: good winter warming foods. I need to start cooking more beans. I need to motivate myself for winter squash. It's not really my favorite food; I always think it sounds good, but then just don't follow through with actually cooking and eating it. Maybe I just need better recipes. Maybe we need to eat more Pumpkin Pie!

Putting the cart before the horse, I've been discussing the hows of food storage, but not the whys. Reason 1. If you're going to eat mostly local food, you need to store for half the year, so you have something to eat the other half. Reason 2. Stored food also gives you some security in very uncertain times. Even if a family member loses their job or gets their pay cut, with a good pantry of stored foods you know that everyone will eat. As Sharon Astyk says, two important questions in hard economic times are: "Is there dinner? Do I get any?"

Long-term storage for hard times has some different aspects from seasonal storage, since you don't want to be running out of food in the summer either. I'll write some posts on this subject in the near future. Meanwhile, check out Sharon's food storage group for loads of information and experiences from real people in every part of the country. You can even see my name there once in a while.

I'll keep you posted from time to time on our experiences with our stored food: what we wish we had more of, what we had too much of, and recipes using the foods.