Ridiculously Cheap - A Minor Rant

Last Thursday I went to the market to pick up an order of pumpkins and kabocha squash from one of my farmers.  I've been to this woman's tiny farm on the opposite side of our county.  I know how she operates and what's important to her, though I can't recall if she bothered with organic certification or not.  I'd emailed her to ask for half a dozen pumpkins, and half a dozen smallish winter squash to replace the crops that failed for us this year.  I had purchased a single pumpkin from her two weeks prior to that, so I thought I had an idea of what to expect in terms of cost for my bulk order.

When I arrived to pick up my order, it was all put together in a large cardboard box, and the farmer showed me a little receipt with the weights and totals for the two different crops.  She wanted something like $16 - total - for the dozen orbs in the box.  At first I didn't understand, thinking that was the charge for either the pumpkins or the kabocha.  But no, that was all she wanted for everything.  Thirty cents per pound, she said.  I pulled out $30 and told her she wasn't charging nearly enough money for her vegetables.  I was serious. That's about what I'd arrived expecting to pay, and I was shocked that she was asking so little for the fruits of her labor.  Of course she protested, but finally consented to take $20 for more than fifty pounds of her produce.  But only after adding a pepito pumpkin to the box.  She said it was a seed pumpkin, and then added apologetically that the flesh was not edible and that sadly, the pumpkin was a hybrid, so I couldn't save the seed.

Now I know my blog is ostensibly about frugality, and hey, I'm all for the stocking of larders with wholesome, local food purchased in season, when it should be cheapest.  October is certainly the time to stock up on winter squash if you have any storage space and didn't grow your own.  But this was ridiculous, and it has nagged at me ever since, even as I lugged my purchased bounty down into the root cellar.  I really feel this farmer should be charging more for her food.  I want her to stay in business and contribute to my foodshed more than I want to supplement my homegrown food for the lowest cost.  If she can't make a profit from her farm, she won't be around to help feed us in the future.

I suppose I should see this as a good thing, especially for those that are really struggling in this economy.  $20 for a dozen winter squash will give me the basis for at least 48 individual servings; less than 50 cents per serving.  For some people, the lower price per pound might mean the difference between kids going hungry or being fed.  But we can still afford to pay more.  I'd be happy to pay on a sliding scale for the few kinds of produce I still need to buy.  Last month I paid over $1.50 per pound for onions produced at a local farm incubator project, and was happy to do so.  So why should the squash cost so much less than the onions?  In fact, when I was in our local supermarket to buy tofu and some kosher salt the day after my farmers market purchase, I saw a whole display table of non-organic squash in the produce aisle.  You know what they were charging for winter squash?  79 cents per pound - more than 2 1/2x what the local farmer was asking.  The really big and impressive hubbards and pumpkins were going for $1/pound.

I feel like going back to the market this week and telling her about the supermarket pricing.  I don't know why this riles me so much.  Maybe it's because I know how much work it is to raise vegetable crops.  I certainly wouldn't sell my winter squash to anyone for thirty cents a pound.  It would seem downright insulting to accept that little.  I'd feel better about giving it as a gift than valuing it so cheaply.  I'm going to take that farmer a loaf of my bread the next time I have a big baking day.  It seems only fair to me.

Anyway, I'm not entirely sure where I was going with this rant.  Bottom line is, if you're worried about food security in the near term, now is an excellent time to ask a local grower about a bulk purchase of winter squash.  They are among the easiest vegetables to store.  Make sure those you buy for storage have stems intact, and don't pick them up or carry them by the stem.  Put them in a cold part of your house, (55-60F/13-16C is ideal) and use them up by spring.  For those of you concerned about long term food security without any immediate personal economic crisis looming, you might consider paying top dollar to your local farmers for what you need to get through the winter.  Food security is, after all, both personal and regional, both immediate and long term.

Too Busy Doing to Write

With high summer in full swing, I've lapsed on the posting.  This seems to be my perennial conundrum.  When I have time to write, there's not much doing.  And when I'm doing lots of things that might interest other people, I'm too tired at the end of the day to do much writing.  So if pictures are really worth a thousand words, then I figure I can catch up on the writing really quick with the following.

Lasagna mulching.  I don't think the garden has ever looked quite so respectable in August.

Second cold frame.  Recently cobbled together with scavenged materials and ready to plant any day now. (Okay, it's really overdue for planting, but that's gardening.)  Isn't it just darling?  I want to plant nothing but Napoli carrots in it.

Elderberry-pear jam.  These will have to stand in for all the other canning I've been doing lately, including tomato sauce, chicken stock, and grape juice concentrate.  This jam is the prettiest of them all by far.

"Kimchee" made with Tuscan kale (instead of cabbage) and other vegetables from our garden.  Still fermenting, but already pretty tasty, especially the Hakurei turnips.

Homemade ancho chili powder. I may do a separate post on this as there was definitely a learning curve to preparing this stuff.  Smoked over our own apple wood chips, it smells so much richer and fruitier than store-bought.  We use quite a lot of ancho powder.

Solar hot water.  Admittedly, it's not my personal achievement, but it's finally - finally - on-line.  This will heat our house this winter and reconfigure our relationship to washing our whites.  We plan to situate a hoop house over the line that dumps excess heat into the earth - a project for next year.

Tomato Canning Begins

A friend is coming over in a few hours to can roasted tomato sauce with me.  I don't bother with canning whole or chopped tomatoes.  The roasted sauce serves equally well for pizza or pasta; we don't seem to miss store-bought canned tomatoes, so I don't see the need.  If you'd like to see how the roasted tomato sauce is made, check out my post on it from last year.  For the record, I pressure can this sauce at ten pounds of pressure for 25 minutes in quart jars.  But please consult a reliable canning guide rather than taking any anecdotal canning recommendations you find in the blogosphere.

My canning goal for this year with regards to tomatoes is to get enough sauce into jars to see us through two years.  I'm still traumatized by last year's late blight which left us with hardly any tomato crop to speak of.  I canned only three quarts of sauce, which we soon ran through.  I resolved to make a big effort this year if we had a good crop.  If blight rears its ugly head again next year, I'll be able to coast through with what I put up now.  If next year is a good tomato year, I can put up just one year's supply and still have a year's supply in reserve.  So far it looks like June and July's blistering heat and little rain have protected us from blight and set us up for a good tomato harvest.  My estimate for a two-year supply of tomato sauce is somewhere between 30 and 40 quarts.  I'm going to try my best to put that much up in the next three to four weeks as the tomatoes come in.  Extra quarts are always good to have for gifting.  If our own supply of tomatoes is insufficient, I may resort to buying locally grown.  But first I'm going to see how we fare on our own production.

Much of our cherry tomato crop is going to be smoked in our homemade trash can smoker.  We're still slowly working our way through the apple wood chips we made ourselves from the first pruning of our apple tree after we move in three years ago.  These are excellent material for smoking, and homegrown too.  After smoking, I dehydrate the cherry tomatoes until they are shelf-stable.  We then keep them on hand for adding to winter stews, pasta dishes, and polenta.  Super-sweet cherry tomatoes smoked over our own apple wood give a marvelous flavor boost to winter meals. 

Speaking of growing tomatoes, I have to gush a bit about the Speckled Roman tomato.  My last few posts have included pictures of this beauty if you want to see what it looks like.  I'm more and more impressed with it as time goes on.  This variety is a stabilized hybrid of Banana Legs and Antique Roman tomatoes.  "Stabilized hybrid" means that someone worked on the cross of the two parent varieties until they had a genetic line that breeds true.  In other words, it's now open pollinated.  In other other words, it's possible to save seeds from Speckled Roman tomatoes and reliably get Speckled Roman tomatoes from those seeds.  I like the fact that it's open pollinated.  I love their unusual and beautiful appearance.  I like both the texture and flavor - meaty and solid enough to make a good slicing tomato, but full of well balanced tang and sweetness.  I love the fact that they very rarely split; this characteristic redeems the only moderate production from each plant, since I can count on harvesting just about every fruit that forms.  And I really appreciate the Speckled Roman's ability to resist late blight, which I saw first hand last year.  This is only my second year growing this variety, but I'm definitely sold on it over other paste tomato varieties.  In fact, I'm strongly considering making it my primary tomato in future years and planting only a couple of beefsteaks and cherries. 

Elderflower Cordial

Mmmm!  I'm thrilled to report that the two elder plants we put in last year have produced well already.  The one that died and came back from the root stock is much smaller than the real survivor, but both have set blossoms.  I was hugely excited to try making elderflower cordial from our own harvest.  (Despite the name, this cordial is non-alcoholic.) What little was left over when I'd filled my canning jars was just enough to pour over two tumblers of ice and mix with our good well water.  It's delicious.  Very different from the outrageously expensive bottled stuff from Austria that I used to buy.  Ours has more floral and green notes, and a more complex taste overall.  I think I honestly prefer ours on the basis of taste alone.  Add in the personal satisfaction, lower carbon footprint, and financial savings and there's no contest.  If I could make enough cordial, I'd drink this stuff every day of the year.

In making the cordial, I took instruction from The River Cottage Preserves Handbook.  Basically, it's elderflower essence with citrus zest and juice, plus sugar - a pretty easy recipe and procedure so far as food preservation goes.  I'm so enamoured of all things River Cottage at the moment that I actually pre-ordered this title before it was published, and paid full price for it, though admittedly by using a gift card.  The Preserves Handbook is no less impressive than the two other River Cottage cookbooks I've got.  Really an inspiring range of usual and unusual preserves, and very much geared to those who like to graze the hedges and forage.  Though originally published in England, there's not much here that seems out of reach to my mid-Atlantic American milieu.  I don't know that we have fruiting edible hawthorns or wild gooseberries, but everything else at least sounds familiar. If you're accustomed to following USDA recommendations for canning, the British methods of preservation set out in this book will seem either a little lax or refreshingly low on the paranoia scale, depending on your perspective.  I found it easy enough to follow the recipe to prepare the syrup, and then use the Ball Blue Book recommendations for canning other syrups.  I may try to squeeze in another batch of this cordial this year.  If I can scare up some crab apples (I think our neighbors have a tree) I plan to use some of our elderberries in the Handbook's hedgerow jam recipe later in the year.  If not, the recipe for Pontack, a sweet-sour sauce made from elderberries, sounds right up my alley.

The River Cottage Preserves Handbook mentions that there's a lot of variation in the scent and flavor of blooms from one elder to the next, and I can see even from our tiny sample pool that this is quite true.  The first batch of elderflower essence I made from the blooms of the smaller plant had a strong green-grassy aroma, not all that pleasant in fact.  I ended up throwing that batch out before adding any of the citrus or sugar; not much invested, so no great loss.  The blossoms on the larger plant smelled better on the branch, and I also took the precaution of removing as much of the stem from the blooms as was feasible before steeping them.  It made all the difference.  I look forward next year to trying batches from the two different elders we put in this year.  In the meantime, maybe I can find some gasket-topped bottles to store the cordial in.  That would be both prettier and easier to pour.

What are you canning these days?

Dispatches from the Curing Front

I spent yesterday in a kitchen with three farmers and several hundred pounds of pork and beef. We worked on curing pork bellies, fatback, and preparing sausages in real casings. We also regularly sampled finished specimens of lomo (Spanish, cured pork tenderloin), pepperoni, basturma (Lebanese, cured beef), bresaola (Italian, loin cured with red wine), and several other delicacies. As I had no meat of my own to contribute, I brought along a dish of pork organ paprikash, and some of my homegrown potatoes for lunch.

It was hard work, but it was also fun. I personally prepared about 45 pounds of bacon, 30 pounds of tesa, and about 15 pounds of salo, Ukrainian cured fatback. (The picture above shows a bus tub with three of the whole pork bellies I prepared. The liquid in the tub isn't blood; it's maple syrup.) The simple repetition of the steps gives me a reassuring sense of familiarity with the process. I came home with six pork jowls from pasture-raised hogs to cure at home. I'm very glad of this as I really miss having home-cured guanciale on hand in my larder. I will either pay for the jowls or give some of them back to the farmer for payment. These jowls are much, much leaner and meatier than the two I previously cured, but I look forward to seeing how they turn out. I plan to start them curing today.

The batch of lardo I started at home has taken a detour. As soon as I took them out of the cure and hung them up in our root cellar to dry down, we had a heavy, multi-day rainstorm. The humidity in the root cellar got as high as 90%, and the pieces of lardo were all wet to the touch. I panicked and decided to get them out of the damp and add a little more preservation to the mix. I smoked all of them. Smoke is itself a preservative, and has the nice side benefit of adding a flavor I love. So that batch of fatback is no longer really lardo; I have no idea what to call it. It's drying down now in the refrigerator, though I could just as well put it back in the root cellar. I've used bits of it for cooking so far, and it gives a really lovely flavor to dishes. I may start over with another batch of lardo.

I also learned yesterday that I probably could have just let the lardo go in the high humidity brought on by the storm. As long as the temperature stayed cool, the temporarily excessive humidity probably wouldn't have been a problem. I should be able to use the root cellar for drying cured meats year-round so long as the temperature stays below 60 F (15 C). Since the root cellar is on the northwest corner of our home and mostly below grade, I think there's a fair chance it will remain cool enough all through the summer. Humidity of 70-75% is considered ideal for hanging cured meats, but higher levels are not problematic unless they persist for a long time or are accompanied by high temperatures. In the case of dried sausages, even higher humidity is desirable during hanging, since low humidity results in case hardening, a condition in which the outer surface of the sausage dries so quickly and thoroughly that it becomes an impermeable barrier to the moisture in the center of the sausage. In that case the center stays very soft. Contrasted with the hard outer surface, this results in a sausage that is ruined so far as texture is concerned.


Most of all, what I took away from both yesterday's cure-fest and my own fumbling experiments with home-curing is that this is really a very easy method of food preservation. Cavemen did it; there's just very little that can go awry with a salt cure. It makes no sense that curing meat is regarded as such a dangerous and arcane practice. This is a revelation to me; I was as much under the impression that meat needs to be handled with a level of caution approaching paranoia as anyone else in American society. But I now think that if you're beginning with meat that has been cleanly raised, slaughtered, and butchered, (in other words, no industrial meat) you'd be hard pressed to go wrong. It's ridiculously easy and there's hardly anything to it, beyond a measure of hygiene and common sense.

If you live where humidity is reasonably high and temperatures reasonably low for at least part of the year (or if you can arrange those conditions), and if you can get locally produced meat that hasn't gone through an industrial meat processing plant, you could safely cure meats at home. Very little equipment is needed for a beginner who just wants to cure whole cuts of meat, especially if you're working with small quantities. A scale is helpful, but not absolutely necessary. If you want to make sausage, the equipment needs go up, as does the need for stricter sanitary controls. With whole cuts of meat, there are far fewer opportunities for contamination. All you need is a supply of salt, perhaps some sugar, spices or herbs, a container for the curing, and a suitable place for hanging the meat to dry. You can easily improvise equipment for the hanging, either skewers, or butcher's twine, or a saved net bag that onions are sold in. It certainly helped my confidence to begin curing during the winter months when outside air temperatures pretty well precluded spoilage. But so long as you have an area that remains cool enough, you can do it anytime of year.

If you want to learn about home-curing through reading, there are many books out there. I got a few recommendations yesterday which I'll be requesting through my local library. The few books I have personally read and can recommend are:

The River Cottage Meat Book
Cooking by Hand
Home Sausage Making

As I have the chance to read more titles on charcuterie, I may update this list of recommended titles. In the meantime, explore and experiment! There's a whole world of home-cured deliciousness out there!

Rerun: Freezing Eggs

I got several requests for information about freezing eggs. So I'm running this oldie again. You can use this method whenever you need to deal with a glut of eggs, as I do at the moment. Or you can use it to prepare for a hiatus in egg laying from your own hens due to summer heat, winter dark, or moulting. Enjoy!



I've mentioned before that we got four older laying hens this past spring. They still turn out eggs like champs, despite the summer heat and their ages. I get more than enough eggs for us to eat. So I sell a dozen now and then to friends or family. Even so, I can still end up with surplus eggs on my hands. So, knowing that we're going to cash in these hens this winter, I've started preserving some eggs.

The classic reference for preserving all kinds of food, Stocking Up, gives very simple instructions on freezing eggs. Just add 1 teaspoon of table salt or honey for every cup of eggs and beat them really well. After that, I use my ice cube tray trick, ladling the salted beaten egg into the ice cube trays and freezing them. Oh, but before I do that, I spray the tray with baking spray oil. That helps the eggs come out of the tray much more easily once they're frozen. Each compartment of the tray happens to hold two tablespoons, which is equivalent to half an extra-large egg. So for any recipe that calls for an egg, I can just use two frozen cubes. Removed from the trays, these eggs will keep for up to six months in a ziploc bag in the freezer.

I probably won't be using these for scrambled eggs. But I will use them up in my baking projects, which always pick up in the wintertime. It's nice to run the oven then, and it's not self-defeating to warm up the house a bit. I like to stock my freezer full of a variety of breakfast muffins over the winter. And I'm planning to learn how to make panettone later this year too (with a view towards holiday decadence as well as gift-giving), so the stored eggs will come in very handy.

I know we're going to miss the fresh eggs when the girls stop laying. It will be very galling to have to go to the store and actually buy eggs. Having a supply of our home produced eggs for baking will take some of the sting out of it for us, I hope.

Of course, I could also store away some prepared foods that include eggs. I may well get around to making some quiche to freeze. Another possibility for when our potatoes finally come in is to make gnocchi with egg and then freeze the gnocchi. The gnocchi would store longer than the quiche, which should only be kept for a couple of months. But gnocchi are quite labor intensive to produce, so I'll have to see what other chores are on the horizon when the potatoes are ready for harvest.

In any case, now that I know the frozen egg trick, I'll never leave eggs in the refrigerator before setting off on a longish trip.

A Sudden Glut of Eggs

What do you do when your farmer friend asks if she can park her car in your driveway for three weeks while she visits family faraway? You say yes. What about when she also asks for a ride from your place to the bus station? You say, "of course." And when she drops off eight dozen eggs along with the car because her husband forgot to give them away at work that day? If you're like me, you have a minor panic attack.

Eight dozen eggs! When she set the box down at the edge of my driveway, I asked what was in it. I thought she said, "a dozen eggs." An extra dozen eggs is no big deal. But lo, and behold, upon returning from the bus station, I found eight fully loaded egg cartons; not one. I was really glad it was winter and that the root cellar was cold, because finding that much fridge space would have been the first problem. Did I mention that our own four laying hens have been performing quite well themselves? It's not like there was an egg shortage here in the first place.

So...eggs. Eggs and...potatoes. Eggs and....guanciale. Eggs and...dried figs? Pumpkin? Beans? What am I supposed to do with all these eggs? I know, I know. I'll freeze some. I'll let some "age" so I can make deviled eggs. I'll make and freeze a few quiche. And I'll give some away. But still. That's a lot of eggs.

What's your favorite way to eat an egg? What's your best suggestion for dressing up eggs for a lunch or dinner?

On Meal Planning with a Garden

I've been thinking lately about the ways that producing our own food has changed our eating and cooking habits. Although fresh foods are somewhat scarce for us right now, in the depths of winter, in some ways I have more freedom to choose what I feel like cooking. When the garden has passed its peak output for the year, and much of what it produced has either been eaten or preserved, the pressure eases off. Oh, there are still things out there to harvest; parsnips and a few hardy plants in the cold frame. But all these things can hang out for a while. They don't present themselves with the same urgency as summer crops, which will rot, bolt, turn tough or bitter, get eaten by varmints, or simply overwhelm through sheer numbers if not harvested promptly.

What arrives in fall and stays through early spring is a measure of free choice in what I cook and what we eat. Sure, there are the harvested pumpkins, and squash, and potatoes to use up, but they too give me more latitude than summer's bounty. All summer long and into early fall I cook and preserve food in a race to keep up with what's coming in. That comes about from - and requires - a change in the way I think about cooking, and this was no small thing for me.

See, I trained as a chef. After mastering the fundamentals, we were taught to approach cooking as a creative challenge and as an expression of "personality." It was about sexing up a chicken breast to make it seem less trite, or assembling flavors in novel ways to tickle a jaded palate. We weren't taught to think about seasonality or regionality very much, unless it was something that could be translated into marketing text on a menu. And yes, we were very much taught to look at menus as marketing tools. Back then, the concept of local food was nowhere near the surface of national consciousness; it had only a small novelty value to a few menu-scrutinizing gourmands. Food miles never entered the discussion of my culinary training - not once.

That way of thinking took hold strongly in me. I've lived in areas where high quality ingredients were available to me at any time, irrespective of food miles or season. For years just about any exotic ingredient you could imagine was at my fingertips, ready tools at the service of my artistic vision in the kitchen. When thinking about meal preparation, it was routine for me to thumb idly through a cookbook, looking for a recipe that caught my fancy. Or I might simply sit back and ask myself what I felt like eating that night, and then proceed to acquire the necessary ingredients from the store. This was a deeply ingrained habit of thought, and it's one that runs counter to the realities of a food garden. This meant that when I gardened back then, I was a dabbler, and the food I produced myself was always adjunct and secondary to the "real" source of food - stores and farmers' markets. If I didn't feel like eating what was ripe in my own garden, I didn't. And I did no preserving in those days. I'm ashamed to say that (while some of it got eaten and some given away) too much of that homegrown food simply went to waste.

When I became more serious about producing my own food and frugality in general, the harvests soon collided with my habits of thought around cooking. It was no longer about what I felt like cooking; wasting home grown food was no longer acceptable. The game had changed, and the challenges were now based in real life and not the creative life of a "culinary artist." It took a while, but I came to consider the garden and my pantry my primary sources of food. Purchased food, from any source, is now secondary. The differences are significant. I now understand the value in single-ingredient-themed cookbooks. When you're getting upwards of 25 eggs per week, or have just harvested 100 pounds of potatoes, cookbooks devoted entirely to egg or potato dishes seem like a really good idea. I used to find such cookbooks boring. Not any more.

Now meal preparation begins with an assessment of what needs using up, whatever the season. That's not to say my cooking is a constant state of triage in which I find ways to salvage food that's beginning to go off. No, I'm talking about staying ahead of the curve and eating or storing foods at their peak. I still have plenty of range for creative expression in my cooking. But now I start with the given of the foods we have, and I take pleasure in finding interesting things to do with these high-quality building blocks. I still use cookbooks, but I'm much more likely than previously to substitute ingredients based on what we have.

Even in winter, the food put up in canning jars, the freezer, or simply hanging out in cool storage needs to be tracked and eaten. Those foods have a shelf life like any other (natural) food. Even if they aren't about to go off, I need to know what I have on hand in order to plan the next year's garden crops and how they will be eaten or preserved. We got almost no tomatoes in 2009, so this year I'll try to put up two years' worth of sauce, just in case we get hit with blight again. On the other hand, we made enough jam to last us a couple of years. So we'll use up the fruit we produce in other ways.

Another difference is that for most of the year we eat fresher, more nutritionally dense food, and we eat in the seasonal sequence of produce gluts. During the winter, we eat food that was processed (by me, at home) at optimal nutrition and freshness. I'm working on making fresh foods more available in the cold months through season extension with cold frames too.

Here are a few ingredient-themed cookbooks I've found useful in helping me cook from both the garden and preserved or stored foods.

Simply in Season
The Compleat Squash
The Bean Bible
The Good Egg
One Potato, Two Potato


If you can recommend any other cookbooks that help use up garden gluts or commonly stored foods, please let me know in the comments.

We Now Have a Root Cellar

The root cellar project took shape as a twinkle in my eye about the time we had an energy audit for our home, last April. In the course of discussing insulation for our basement, it occurred to me that, left uninsulated and then sealed off, one small room at the northwest end of the basement could be turned into a root cellar. So when the house was air sealed and foamed, that part of the basement was left alone, to let the heat continue to leak out through the walls. We consulted the Bubels' excellent guide, Root Cellaring, for pointers on design. My husband tackled the messy and difficult job of drilling two seriously large holes through the ceiling of this room and up through the cement slab of our front porch, in order to provide ventilation. He got this done in an afternoon with a rented impact drill.

The last pieces of the puzzle were a custom built and professionally installed door to create a good air seal from the rest of the basement, plus running a light for the room. Given the weird dimensions and lack of square or plumb doorway openings so typical to old farmhouses in this area, no off-the-shelf door was going to work. In the end this project cost us quite a bit more out of pocket than we imagined it would. On the other hand, it's a pretty big room for storing food, and the root cellar cost a lot less than a new refrigerator. I'm looking at it from this perspective: now that the root cellar is built, it will require no further energy or monetary inputs to function as long as the house exists and someone is around to use it. We spent now so that we have this valuable resource later, whether we have money or not.

I know that picture up there looks like there should be bloody streaks on every surface and manacles mortared into the stone walls. What can I say? Old farmhouse basements can be kinda creepy. The room measures about 4' by 9' (1.2 m by 2.7 m). Undoubtedly, it and the adjacent room of similar size once held coal for the original furnace of the house. At 5' 7" (170 cm) I can stand up in this room comfortably, but my 6' 2" (188 cm) husband cannot. No matter. It'll be mostly me going in there. We'll still need shelving before this year's harvest. In the meantime, my husband has promptly taken advantage of the free cooling for his beer, using scavenged wooden pallets to keep the boxes from the dampness of the unsealed floor. This room is naturally humid, and sometimes even has a little standing water in it after heavy rains. For the most part, dampness is not a problem in root cellars. Many crops hold better with plenty of humidity in the air. We may need to add moisture at times if the air is too dry.

I've been watching the temperature in the root cellar since the door was installed. Outside daytime temperatures have been below freezing for about a week now. The basement temperature, just outside the root cellar and very near to the furnace, has been around 63 F/17 C. Over the last week the root cellar's temperature has dropped slowly from the high 40's to 39 F/<4 C. That's pretty cold! I'll be very curious to see how the temperature changes over the year.

I'm planning to experiment with keeping ice in the root cellar. I started with a few plastic jugs, but found that they are thawing fairly quickly at current temperatures. I am waiting on the collection of plastic soda and juice bottles from relatives. When I have a bunch I'll fill them with water and let them freeze on the porch, then put them together in the root cellar. I'm curious to see how long ice can be kept in there. I would like to try to get a sufficiently large number of containers packed together in an insulated box of some sort. In earlier times, people kept massive quantities of ice all year long, even in warm climates, just packed in sawdust or other insulating materials. Of course, I can only fit so much ice into this root cellar, so I won't have the advantage of a large thermal mass. But it's a wintertime experiment to keep myself occupied.

It works!

I picked several pumpkins about 5 weeks ago which weren't fully ripe, leaving several inches of the vine attached to the stem. Somewhere on these intertubes I'd read that partially ripe pumpkins can be finished off inside on a sunny windowsill this way. So I thought I'd give that a try. I'm happy to report that all but the smallest and greenest of those pumpkins now look fully ripe. We don't have great southern exposure from any window in our house; too many large shade trees that screen the light, even with bare branches. So the pumpkins ripened very slowly. But they did ripen. These underripe pumpkins I was able to salvage just about doubled our total pumpkin harvest.

Just thought some of you might like to know this trick for next year. Now to move the ripe pumpkins to the coolest room in the house. They like to be stored around 50 degrees F (10 C).

First Foray Into Home Curing: Guanciale

Let me tell you why it pays to know your farmer. That farmer friend I've mentioned a few times? The one who raises her animals on pasture, including our Thanksgiving turkey, and who occasionally throws some bones my way for free? She called me up on the Friday before Thanksgiving to ask if I wanted some random pork bits. Seems a few of her customers that bought whole or half hogs didn't want some of the less choice cuts, even though they had paid for the entire animal. So I was being offered pork jowls, organs, and possibly some other trimmings or offal as well. Of course I thought of Hank, and of course I said I was interested. My policy is not to turn down free handouts unless what's being offered would really present problems. Free pasture-raised local pork does not present any problems. The need for a little research, yes; problems, no.

We got to the butcher's shop on Sunday morning. It wasn't clear exactly what bits were unclaimed, and it was clear that the butcher would put whatever he was permitted to keep into scrapple or headcheese, and render down any fat into lard. Not being a paying customer, I didn't want to seem too acquisitive. I left with two pork jowls, a liver, heart and a tongue.

We're headed into the perfect time of year for curing meat - the dry, cold months of winter. And I've long wanted to try making my own guanciale (say: gwan CHA lay) - cured pork jowls prized in southern Italy and eaten like bacon. It's the authentic ingredient in several traditional pasta sauces, including spaghetti alla carbonara, for which I've always substituted American bacon. Traditional carbonara only has a handful of ingredients: eggs, garlic, cured pork, black pepper, noodles, and a good aged grating cheese. We produce our own eggs and garlic. I can get a surprisingly good grating cheese locally made from pasture-raised raw milk. Being able to source locally and then cure pork jowls into guanciale, and therefore to prepare a truly local carbonara or Amatriciana would be nothing to sneeze at. So starting about ten days ago I embarked on my first home curing project.

I cannot tell you how thrilled I was to trim out a pair of hog jowls, scatter a mixture of salt, sugar, black pepper, other spices and some herbs from our garden over them, weight it all down in a bowl, and stash them in the fridge. I felt like the cat that ate the canary, with a free pork experiment in the fridge. It almost didn't matter how it turned out. Almost. As the meat sat in the salt-sugar mixture over the past week, it released a fair amount of liquid which I poured off from time to time. I added some more of the curing mix and turned the jowls over each time I did this. After just over a week I took the meat out of the bowl. It had a noticeably stiffer feeling than when I first salted it. I reapplied the curing mix wherever the meat seemed to need it, and hung it up in our refrigerator to begin the drying process. I managed the hanging by cutting up a wooden dowel into two pieces to fit in the shelf supports inside the fridge, and then piercing the jowls with two metal skewers which rest across the dowels. I've got a plate underneath to catch any drips as the drying process begins.

Fortunately, my husband is away on a business trip, so it's only me rummaging through the fridge this week. I plan to find a place to finish the curing process in our garage after he gets back. That will allow the outdoor temperatures to settle a little more fully into true winter, and let me monitor the beginning of the drying stage quite carefully. If there's any risk of spoilage, it would be right now, when the meat is out of its brine but still pretty moist. So starting the drying process in the refrigerator seems like a good compromise. All told, the guanciale will probably dry down for 4-6 weeks.

The organ meats were a little more challenging to deal with. I have not been a fan of organ meats over the years. The whole idea of eating a chunk of flesh designed either to clean the blood or produce urine somehow lacks a certain appeal. But I'm trying hard to cure myself of food prejudices, and this is certainly an opportunity to put my resolve to the test. I like haggis, so I'm trying to work my way into things from that angle. Hank recommended an Umbrian sausage called mazzafegati, and a dish of pounded pork heart schnitzel with spaetzle. Those Germans, Italians, and Spaniards, good pork eaters that they've been over the centuries - they're the ones who would know how to eat everything but the squeal. Both of Hank's suggestions sounded good to me, but I didn't have time to deal with making them in the days leading up to Thanksgiving. So all the organs got thrown in the freezer. When I get hold of some pork fat and regular pork to bulk out the liver, I'll take a stab at that mazzafegati. And yes, I'll keep you posted on such efforts, as well as how the guanciale progresses.

Wish me luck in my new food preservation endeavor!

Tiny Tip: Test Your Pressure Canner

Did you know that if you live in the US and use a pressure canner, you can probably have the accuracy of the pressure gauge tested for free? Neither did I until I read Sharon Astyk's latest work, Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage & Preservation. Like her earlier works, this one is excellent and contains tons of useful information for those who preserve their own foods. That's how I found out there's another way I can make good use of the state taxes we pay. The Cooperative Extension offices in most counties of the US will have someone on staff with the equipment and know-how to test a pressure canner. And they'll do this for you for free.

I got my pressure canners for free through craigslist, and they are obviously old and well used. Though I replaced some of the rubber parts that came with the canners, I had no way of testing how accurate the pressure gauges were for myself. Having now had them tested, I know that both of them read a little high around the 10 and 15 pound mark. That means I've been canning my foods at pressures that are slightly lower than recommended.

The woman who tested the canner gauges for me said that if I followed all other canning instructions to the T, I'm probably fine eating those foods. My gauges were only off by one half to one pound. (I know that with almost every canning batch I've had trouble not overshooting the recommended pressure at some point during the canning process anyway.) She said it's fine to keep using the pressure canners so long as I correct for the slightly faulty readings on my gauges.

It's good to know this about my pressure canners. If you use a pressure canner to store food for your family, I recommend you take advantage of this free testing service. After all, there's no point in preserving your own food if you can't be confident you can do so safely. With the gardening season mostly done for the year, this would be a good time have the testing done. Just so you know, you probably only need to take the lid to the Extension office, not the entire canner. But check with the person who does the testing to make sure.

More tiny tips.

Gobsmacked by the Implications

So I've been edging closer to lacto-fermentation as a preservation method. There are still some nice looking cabbages out there in my garden. And though significant work has been done on turning a corner of our basement into a root cellar (I know, I haven't posted about this before), we haven't had any properly frigid weather to bring it down to a good temperature, and truth be told it still needs work. The thing that's kept me at arm's length from lacto-fermented products is that I don't like pickles or briny-tasting things. I can't stand olives or capers, and have never understood the appeal of pickled cukes. I've revisited these particular disliked foods and tried to have an open mind, and just found that I really genuinely dislike these things. That said, I have enjoyed kim chi in the past, and I love pickled ginger. So it seems to me that there's some room for optimism that I can make this method of preservation work for us.

Why would I even contemplate trying to work around firmly entrenched food aversions of mine? Well, there are some pretty impressive upsides to lacto-fermentation. For one thing, it's just about the lowest energy-input form of food preservation. You don't need to heat or significantly chill the food being preserved; a cool room will suffice. Over and above that though, lacto-fermentation is the only form of food preservation that gives you a product with more nutrients than the raw food contains. How does that work? The microorganisms doing the lacto-fermentation partially breakdown the food and in the process make more nutrients available to us than our own digestive systems can manage alone. The icing on the cake is that those microorganisms also create narrow-spectrum antibiotics that protect us from a handful of the most common food borne illness culprits (e. coli, listeria, clostridium). So when you eat lacto-fermented foods, you're protected in multiple ways from dietary related illness.

So here's where the wheels in my brain really started spinning. Say you're a nutcase like me, and you're trying to provide as much of your own food as possible on a fairly limited amount of land. You have two challenges: produce enough calories, and produce enough nutrients. Most garden plants give you nutrients, but not too many calories. In order to provide both nutrients and calories you must allocate garden space to crops that supply these two different needs. Lacto-fermentation shifts the space requirements for these two goals.

Let's say, for simplicity's sake, that you divide your 1000 square foot garden into two equal parts: one devoted to cabbage, and the other devoted to potatoes. Cabbages provide excellent nutrition (as well as fiber, by the way), while potatoes are an excellent calorie crop. Let's also say that you can technically meet your family's nutritional needs for the year with 500 square feet of cabbage. But perhaps 500 square feet of potatoes will only provide 40% of the calories needed to feed your family each year. If you can double the nutrition provided by cabbage through lacto-fermentation, you could sacrifice half the garden space given over to this crop without jeopardizing the nutrient needs of your family. If you give that space over to calorie crops, you could get that much closer to self-sufficiency.

My numbers here are entirely hypothetical. I don't know how exactly how much more nutrition results from lacto-fermentation. It probably varies by the vegetable or fruit that is lacto-fermented. Nor do I know how much space is needed to produce 40% of an adult's caloric needs in potatoes. But what's clear is that lacto-fermentation is an important tool that could allow some garden space to be reallocated to calorie crops without sacrificing all-important nutrition. The implications of this are potentially huge for those producing food on small plots of land. More nutrition from the same space, or the same nutrition from less space. I firmly believe that finding ways of increasing food production on - and food value from - small spaces is going to be critically important to future generations.

I'm going to try really hard to find lacto-fermented foods I enjoy eating. I'll start today with a homegrown head (or two) of cabbage, and will post later on how it goes. I plan to explore this method of food preservation over the next year. An acquaintance of mine fairly rhapsodized about a sauerkraut her mother used to buy from a Jewish market that included fresh cranberries and was seasoned with caraway. That sounds delicious to me! If you have any tried and true recipes for lacto-fermented vegetables (especially cabbage), I'd love it if you'd share them or point to them in the comments. And wish me luck!

Roasted Tomato Sauce

Most of my tomato plants succumbed to blight this year. So our usual August tomato glut hasn't really happened. But the silver lining is that the one new tomato variety I tried this year not only tasted good, but it has stood up to the blight better than any of my long time favorites. The Speckled Roman is really striking in appearance too. All things considered, I'm pretty certain I'll be growing this tomato again.

At the end of last week I gathered the largest bunch of tomatoes I'd been able to get together at one time all summer. It came to a bit over 6 pounds. Not a huge amount when it comes to canning, but certainly more than we were going to eat fresh. After letting them ripen a bit inside, out came my canning equipment and the stuff I use for roasted tomato sauce.

My sauce technique comes from a certain, shall we say, rather possessive organization which has been known to go after those who reprint their recipes, and whose name I'm not going to mention here. Fortunately, I haven't needed a written recipe to reproduce their sauce for a few years now. So what I'm going to present here is my roasted tomato sauce methodology. (Click any of the pictures to biggify.)

Firstly you'll need several pounds of tomatoes, a few onions or onion equivalents, some garlic, olive oil, tomato paste, and seasonings. You'll also need large sheet trays with rims, and some thin wire cooling racks or the ones from a toaster oven. You need to come close to filling each sheet tray with racks. Having a little extra space on the sheet trays that the racks can't completely fill is ideal. You also need aluminum foil, and previously used pieces will work just fine. A blender or food processor will be very handy, and then you'll need storage containers for your sauce.

Begin by lining your sheet pans with one large sheet of aluminum foil each. Place the racks over the foil. Wherever you have a fair-sized gap between the rim of the sheet tray and the racks, place a piece of aluminum foil that you shape into a little bowl or tray.

Arrange you oven racks to hold however many sheet trays you are working with. Preheat the oven to 450 F (230 C). In a large mixing bowl, put a few heaping tablespoons of tomato paste. (Use the ice cube tray trick to make sure the rest of the can doesn't go to waste.) Add a roughly equal amount of olive oil. Put in some seasonings such as salt, pepper, and a good pinch of whatever herb you like. Fresh basil or oregano from the garden is nice, but thyme could work well too, and don't disdain dried oregano either. Blend all these ingredients together with your fingertips until it's more or less uniform.

We were out of onions when I made this batch of sauce. So I used the first leek of the season from our garden. A small head of homegrown garlic is in there too.

Peel and coarsely chop a quantity of garlic, and about one small onion for every 2-3 pounds of tomatoes you've got. (Shallots or leeks will work too, if that's what you've got.) Set the garlic and onion aside. Next, cut your tomatoes in half from stem to blossom end. If you wish, remove the tough stem core. Working in manageable batches, add the halved tomatoes to the bowl with the olive oil and tomato paste mixture. Toss the tomatoes with your hands until they are well coated. You especially want the skins well coated. Arrange the tomatoes cut side down on the racks over your sheet trays. Space them as tightly as possible. When all the tomatoes have been coated and arranged on the racks, add the onions and garlic to what remains in the mixing bowl. Toss them well, soaking up the last of the liquid. Arrange the onions and garlic in the little foil bowls on the baking sheets.

Place the sheets in the oven and set the timer for 20 minutes. If you're working with more than one sheet tray, change the position of the trays top to bottom and rotate each of them 180 degrees. Then roast for an additional 20-30 minutes. The skins should be charred in places, and a fair amount of liquid should have dripped into the aluminum foil on the sheet trays. Remove the trays from the oven and let them cool a bit.

The tomatoes on the other sheet tray were better charred than these. But these leeks were nicely caramelized. See the orange liquid? Don't let that go to waste!

Working in batches, place the onions, garlic, and roasted tomatoes in a food processor, working with kitchen tongs. (I don't bother removing the skins, but you can do so if you wish. They should be fairly easy to remove at this point.) Process the sauce until smooth. You may want to include the light colored liquid that has dripped onto the sheet tray. This also makes a nice addition to light summertime vinaigrette though.


At this point, the sauce is ready to eat or to store in whatever way you prefer. I only got three not-too-large jars of sauce out of this batch. But as they say, half a loaf is better than none.

For anyone wondering about the mechanics of this sauce methodology, the natural sugar in the tomato paste is what allows the tomato skins to char nicely and give a roasted flavor to the sauce. The foil liner on the sheet pans doesn't really save you any cleanup (since you're going to wash that foil and re-use it, right?), but it does prevent the liquid that comes off the tomatoes from burning on the sheet pan and becoming useless. Trying this without the racks will give you limp tomatoes that have boiled in their own juices, without much flavor. The racks also allow some of that liquid to evaporate so that the sauce is naturally thickened, even if you add the drippings back in.

Ask and Ye Shall Receive

I'm a tea junkie. As for many people, my day cannot properly begin without a dose of caffeine. But unlike most Americans, my preferred medium is tea, rather than coffee. I'm every bit as particular and fastidious about the tea I drink as any coffee drinker can be. It should be good tea, well brewed, and served piping hot (except, of course, when it's served well chilled).

Now it so happens that one of my most favorite teas is sold by a company on the west coast, where my husband travels several times a year for work. This tea is not cheap, and I don't like to run out of it. So he had been buying several 4-ounce packages each time he was in the neighborhood. He's due for another trip out there, and I finally got it into my head to call the company and ask about a bulk discount. Lo and behold, I ended up placing an order for 5 pounds of tea and getting it at the wholesale rate, or about half the price of the small packages sold at retail prices.

When I spoke to the woman who handles wholesale orders, she initially said that anything over a pound would be sold at a 10% discount, and that there were no further discounts until ten pounds or more were purchased at one time. I didn't argue this, but I said I would be interested in five pounds, then asked if I needed to arrange for that much to be available at one time. At that point she simply offered me the wholesale rate for five pounds of tea, even though she'd just told me that I needed to buy ten pounds to get that big a discount. I didn't ask for clarification, just placed the order.

Needless to say, I'm pretty psyched about securing a large supply of my favorite tea at nearly a 50% discount. I have the space to store the tea in the freezer, and a vacuum sealer to keep the moisture out, so it shouldn't be a problem to buy such a large amount at one time. It made my day to get such a good deal, simply by taking the trouble to ask. The fact that a lot of packaging will be avoided is pure bonus. Moral of the story is: it never hurts to ask. A few minutes of my time on the phone saved us a tidy sum.

Now for the downside. I must acknowledge that tea is not a local product for me. I'm partially consoled by the fact that tea was an item famously traded over long distances in the age of rigged sailing ships. I admit to justifying some foodstuffs such as spices and the occasional citrus fruits in the same way. My husband is traveling to that area anyhow, which means we're not making a special trip just for this one purchase. Beyond that, I have to admit that I am simply dependent upon the stuff and really don't want to go without. Also, I don't know the fair trade status of the particular tea, which is probably not a good sign. It's not easy to be an ethical eater (or drinker) and keep the budget trimmed at the same time.

All this confessional is just my way of saying I'm not perfect either. Sometimes I worry that in focusing on the positive here on my own blog, I paint my life as far more ideal than it really is. My life is a balancing act of my own ethical standards just as much as anyone else's is. So I'm asking in hopes of receiving again - if any of you are serious tea drinkers and can recommend an excellent fair trade black tea, please recommend it in the comments!

Other People’s Fruit

Today I have another guest post from my husband, who, as you will see, is slowly (but surely) being infected with the gardening/homesteading virus. Here's what he's been up to lately.

I was tracking down where heavy rain run-off goes when it leaves our property. What I found was a mini-river in my next door neighbor’s back yard. As I walked downstream I also discovered ripe mulberries in my neighbor’s tree. Here was mature fruit that if left un-harvested would merely become dinner for the local birds. Mulberries are often planted near other more desirable fruits as the birds go after the mulberries first.

So I began harvesting the unwanted berries thinking they would be tasty treats for our three chickens. After spending time harvesting around two pints of berries I began thinking far more selfishly. Why relinquish them to birds that go bonkers for flavorless wild strawberries when mulberries would make a nice treat for humans? So I gathered some wild strawberries, gave a strawberry thrill to our hens, and took the mulberries inside for cleaning.


I was interested in making some jam or even thick syrup. Confession time: On a recent business trip I met a friend at an IHOP just before flying out. It was a convenient location for the both of us; certainly not a culinary pinnacle. But in their defense they do serve tea in teapots. So they get props for that. But the point is that they offer a high-fructose, artificially flavored (courtesy of our flavor chemist industry), berry-ish syrup. I wanted home-made pancakes with real berry syrup. And now, presented with the opportunity, I pulled out the pectin and began something I have never done before…make jam from berries.

I love this type of cooking where there is ambiguity and winging-it is the order of the day. So I read the directions on the pectin packet then embarked on some exploratory cooking. Berries have no natural pectin unlike other fruits. So adding is necessary to get it to gel. I more or less used the recommended amount of sugar and, on the advice of my wife, added lemon juice. The lemon juice really brought out the fruit flavor and added the brightness of citrus.

The instructions for my quick method indicated that after adding the pectin a period of 24 hours was needed for proper setting. I was only prepared to wait about 8 hours until breakfast rolled around. The result was less jam than thick syrup on its way to jam. This was perfect for pancakes. Mulberries tend to have less flavor than other berries. But the jam syrup on pancakes was well received by all.


At the 24 hour mark the jam syrup had not set any more than at the 8 hour mark. But I had achieved something I’d never done. Delayed gratification of stuffing ripe berries straight into my mouth, turning it into jam syrup and scratching the pancake itch with someone else’s unwanted fruit. It was a satisfying feeling.

So now I keep an eye out for unappreciated fruit that could become my treasure. All this for nothing more than some enjoyable harvesting and cooking. I’ve already found another stand of mulberries on their way to ripeness. Perhaps this time I’ll get full-on jam with a bit more pectin. Other people’s fruit…hurrah!

Kate again: I really like the flavor profile of this gleaned treat. It's sort of spicy and dark, with hints of cinnamon and fig. A nice thing to have on hand when a sweet craving strikes. My husband's other guest post can be found here: Homemade Sled Report.

The Limits of Garlic

This year I harvested about 11 pounds of garlic from my backyard garden. After it had cured for a few weeks, we started eating it in the latter part of July. This week I had to finally admit that all the remaining three varieties were reaching the limits of storage. Each time I cut into a bulb, a slender yellow-green shoot was visible in the center, getting ready to bust out of the bulb and sprout. So, with a somewhat sad heart, I decided it was time to process the rest of the bulbs before the sprouting went any further.

I used three different methods to process the garlic. All of them rendered the stinking rose suitable for long term storage. The first method requires some specialized equipment, but the other two do not.


Method the first: I peeled and thinly sliced three heads of garlic, then arranged the slices on a tray of my dehydrator. It took about six hours or so to remove the moisture and render the slices into tough dry garlic chips. These will store at room temperature indefinitely, though they won't last all that long. I'll keep them tightly sealed in clean glass jar in the cupboard, where it'll be fairly dark. In this form, the garlic can be used in soups or stews. If I grind the chips up, I'll have homemade garlic powder, which might be nice on pizza.


The second method was making compound butter. I processed the majority of my remaining garlic in this way. All I had to do was allow butter to soften, and finely mince the garlic. I mixed these two ingredients together until the garlic was evenly blended into the butter. Then I formed the compound butter into little logs, wrapped them up in plastic wrap, and froze them. This will probably prove to be the most versatile form of processed garlic. And it's got more garlic than I would normally use for the amount of butter in there, which means it's highly concentrated. I'll get a lot of garlic for just a little added butter, though I can always add more butter if I want to. There are numerous ways of using this garlic compound butter: on toast, in sauces, on pasta, in mashed potatoes, and as a dollop of decadence on servings of soup. I could even fry my eggs in it. It will keep in the freezer for about three months.

Lastly, I roasted a few heads of garlic when I prepared a whole chicken for dinner. This is a very simple way of processing garlic. I simply removed as many of the papery layers around the bulbs as I could, and then cut off the top of the head so that a portion of each bulb was exposed. Some people add a drizzle of olive oil and a pinch of salt to heads of garlic before roasting. I don't bother, because the roasted garlic tastes great without this extra step. I just wrap each head in a small piece of aluminum foil and toss it in the oven for about an hour. The temperature doesn't matter too much. Anything from 300F to 400F could work, with the total roasting time varying accordingly. Roasted garlic won't keep as easily or as long as the other methods of processing. But on the other hand, it's also the most ready to eat form of the three methods. I find myself spreading a few sticky-sweet cloves on sandwich bread and adding them whole to just about anything I can think of to eat. If I had a great many heads of roasted garlic, I would store some in the freezer, very well wrapped up.


There are other good methods for storing garlic. Pickling is one good method. And some Russians I know swear by a cure-all made from hot chili peppers and raw garlic marinated for several days in vodka. Garlic confit is another cooked form of processing in which many whole cloves are very gently poached in olive oil.

But I have a serious warning now for a garlic storage method which has an enduring and dangerous popularity. Do not store raw garlic in oil, not even in the refrigerator. Like all root vegetables, garlic always has the potential of harboring the botulism bacteria, which is commonly found in most soil types. This is a facultative anaerobic bacteria. What that means is that it can survive in the presence of lots of oxygen, but it really prefers a very low-oxygen environment. When garlic is in the soil, sitting on your shelf, or hanging in a net bag in your basement, it's harmless, because of the high-oxygen environment. The bacteria itself in fact poses no risk to us if we consume small quantities of it. But when you put raw garlic in oil, there is very little oxygen. That means that if there are any botulinum bacteria there, they'll be very happy, and they will begin to create the very powerful and deadly botulism toxin. This toxin cannot be destroyed by cooking, though you may well kill the bacteria that created the toxin. Only a microscopic amount of this toxin is needed to kill a healthy adult. While storing garlic in oil in the refrigerator may slow the bacteria down, it will not kill or completely halt the bacteria. I personally know people who have used this method of storage for years without any ill effects. But they're taking an incredible risk. If they should be unlucky enough to get a case of botulism poisoning, it won't make them sick; it'll probably kill them, and anyone else they serve their stored garlic to.

Okay, on to lighter topics. For kicks, I compared our personal per capita garlic consumption to national statistics. Given that we ate through 10 pounds of garlic in just under 6 months, I make that 10 pounds per person per year in our household. That puts us at more than three times the national average for the US. Of course, we don't come anywhere near Korean levels of garlic consumption, where the average adult reputedly eats through more than a bulb a day. We eat a LOT of it though, both raw and cooked. If it turns out that I live to some extraordinary old age, I'll attribute that longevity to garlic.

I will definitely miss having my own homegrown garlic for the next seven months or so, until next year's crop comes in. And I will deeply resent having to pay for it at the grocery store. I doubt any local grower of garlic will have any to offer at the few farmer's markets that continue to operate through the winter. But I am glad that I made the best use out of this produce and prevented it from going to waste.

Related posts:

Garlic Harvest
The Promise of Garlic
Processed Foods

Grocery Outlet Score

On the way to the store where I most commonly grocery shop is a grocery outlet store. I stop there regularly, because it's on my way to my main shopping destination. But I rarely buy anything. There's never any telling what I'll find there, but by and large it's full of low-quality foodstuffs, most of which are at or past their sell-by date, or have damaged packaging. I stop there regulary though because every once in a great while I've come across organic dairy products. I once bought 12 pounds of organic butter there at $2 each. Having a chest freezer means I can take advantage of such rare deals.

Recently I lucked onto what is probably my best find yet. Fourteen bags of Organic Valley non-fat powdered milk. For $1.39 per bag. I cleaned out the store. Now, I had looked at buying these bags in the past. Once upon a time it was possible to use powdered milk for a substantial savings. But at least when it comes to organic powdered milk at regular prices, there's no savings to be had. A regularly priced bag is $6.99, and it makes 13 cups of reconstituted non-fat milk. That works out to 54 cents per cup, or $4.30 per half gallon, much more than I pay for fresh organic whole milk.

I have scored a few bags of this powdered milk before as a free handout from someone who had paid good money for them but hadn't used them. I used the powdered up bit by bit, adding about one cup to each half gallon of whole milk I bought. One cup of reconstituted non-fat milk becomes indistinguishable when diluted in a quart of more of whole milk, at least to us.

By stocking up on this powdered milk at such a great price, I've laid in a fantastic resource in terms of emergency preparedness. And I'll be cutting the cost of our organic milk for at least a year to come. By adding just one cup of the reconstituted milk, I've effectively lowered the price per half gallon from $3.69 to $3.37. If I add two cups per half gallon, the price per half gallon falls to $3.11. I also just like having powdered milk around for occasions when I want to bake something that calls for milk, without using up all the fresh milk I have on hand. It has certainly saved me a few grocery trips in the past.

I'm going to harangue you just a bit now about a frugal practice that many people dread. It's the price comparison book. This is just a little notebook in which you record the current prices for the foods you happen to shop for, at all of the places you shop at regularly, even if "regularly" means only once per year. While it is a chore to assemble this information, once you've done it, you hold in the palm of your hand an amazing wealth of hard facts and power. No one else can tell you where to find the best prices for the things you buy on a regular basis among the stores that are local to you. Plenty of people can speak in generalities about the consumer price index and regional prices, but you need information specific to you and your area to make the best shopping decisions.

Because I knew that these bags of powdered milk normally sell for $7 in my area, and because I knew how much I normally pay for fresh whole milk, it was completely obvious to me that $1.39 per bag was a steal. It's what gave me the confidence to buy up all fourteen bags on the shelf. If I'd had no idea how much this product normally costs, I might have bought only a bag or two, or none at all. The information in my price comparison book, collected for almost no cost at all, just allowed me a significant ongoing savings.

Non-fat powdered milk will keep for a very long time if it is stored in an airtight container, and in a dark and cool area. Fortunately, the powdered milk I purchased comes in a tightly sealed bag. Even better, I have room for them in my chest freezer, which will prolong their shelf life. I could keep them in the basement though if I didn't have room. Once the packages are opened, the powdered milk will begin to deteriorate, so I will try to use it up fairly quickly. Given the amount of baking I do and diluting our fresh milk with the powdered, I don't think we'll see any spoilage.

Have a look around in your area for grocery outlets. And if you don't see anything of interest there the first time you shop, give it another try about a month later. You may surprise yourself with what you can find there!