Green Tomatoes

I just finished canning two batches of green tomato relish. The first batch was the standard recipe found in the older edition of the Ball Blue Book. The second batch was almost the same except for the chilies added just for the Huz, who likes things a bit spicier than I do. I now have 8 1/2 pints of the regular GTR, and 15 1/2 half-pints of the "hot" GTR. Despite the fact that all I had to do was add the salted vegetables to the special brine, boil it and hot pack it, the processing still took me several hours to complete. The good news: every jar sealed. That's a 100% success rate.

If you haven't heard of or tried green tomato relish, you should definitely try it. It's amazingly good; I made some last year just to try it and see what would happen, and the whole family liked it so much that they all wanted me to make it again this year. Not only is it a wonderful way to use those end-of-season green tomatoes, but I find that if I use this relish, I don't need to use ketchup (especially the modern kind of ketchup with all the high fructose corn syrup in it!) The green tomato relish has just enough of a tomato taste that it satisfies the palate that would otherwise want ketchup on burgers or hot dogs, etc. And then because it's also relish, it just seems to take care of the ketchup and relish taste both at once. And because the relish has mustard seed in it, it pretty much takes care of a mustard taste also. This kind of makes it the perfect condiment, because if you have it, you don't really need any others. All that from a few green tomatoes and a little investment of time. Keep in mind also that this is a relish not easily found in your typical big box grocery store.

Gadgets with Gaskets

We inherited a wonderful gift from the Huz's folks--his mom's 22-quart pressure canner. From what we remember our folks doing and the directions we got from the Ball Blue Book, we know how to can our own veggies. We have the equipment and the knowledge to do it safely, and with the availability of free produce from the community garden and gifts of fruit, etc. from friends and acquaintances, we've been able to put by a fair amount of food for the winter. I can safely say that we don't need any more jam! I would like to have the wherewithal to can peaches and applesauce next. Thanks to the community garden, we've nearly got enough beans, and were even able to put away a few pints of peas. With any luck, we'll get a decent number of tomatoes this year from our own garden, but we'll see how that goes. I need a certain number to be ripe all at once in order to actually process them as canned tomato sauce or juice.

The other challenges we've had other than coming in between bean harvests has been time to do the canning, and problems with our canner's gasket/seal. Our canner was made by the Mirro company prior to 1983, and requires a very specific gasket. We have model M-0622. All the info online says that the correct gasket for this canner was the S-9882 model. However, after so many of these gaskets failed and became rippled or limp, we got frustrated and contacted the company directly. They responded to the Huz's email and told us that the correct gasket for our model of canner was in fact the S-3440, not the other one. I tried to get this gasket through Ace, the only local place where they actually sell canner parts, and the only one they had in their inventory was the other one--the wrong one we'd been using and hating for so many years. So I went online and found the correct gasket and ordered it in. $14.00 and a few days later, we had a new gasket, which looks similar to the others but ever so slightly different. It's a little thicker, for one thing, and the rubber curves outward just a touch. We tried it today to see how it would do, and lo and behold, a perfect seal. No dripping water from under the sides of the canner lid, no hissing, no trouble getting the canner up to pressure. Perfect.

Now, why the original misinformation as to which seal was the correct one for this model of canner? It seems to be a relatively uncommon model of canner, but still.... Just in case anyone else has been experiencing this frustration, the correct gasket for the model M-0622 Mirro-Matic 22 quart pressure canner is the gasket formerly known as the S-3440, now known as just the 3440. It is available from a company called Red Mill, as well as a couple others. Google "pressure canner gasket 3440," and you should readily find a place to buy one online. Good luck, and I sympathize! This gasket actually works; trust me.

Be Kind to the Beans

We've had an interesting time this summer, both in keeping ourselves fed, bills paid, etc. The most interesting part is that we've been so blessed and so fortunate in the food department. The nearby community garden we've become involved with has provided us with nearly enough beans to get us through the upcoming winter months. We've canned many quarts of beans from that community garden, even though most of the harvesting happened when the beans were past their first flush of production. Fortunately the garden people waited and did not till over the beans as they'd proposed doing, for now they seem to be gearing up for a second production run.

The only trouble we've had lately has been that people are not careful when they go through the bean patch. They seem to think that it doesn't matter how rough they are with the bean bushes, and often they end up pulling up the entire bush, or breaking off so many branches when they go for the green beans that the poor plant ends up nearly dead afterward. It's a shame that people aren't better educated about where their food comes from or even in the simple concept that if you want a plant to produce more food for you over the course of a growing season, it's important to make sure you don't kill the plant the first time you harvest from it. It's frustrating to go along a row and see the swath of devastation someone else cut in their eagerness to get at a few fresh beans for their dinner. From what I've heard from others this year, many people don't have much of an idea how to grow their own vegetables, so they go by trial and error, as if this were a new technology they're learning. And many don't have any more idea of how to preserve their harvest than simply to stick food in freezer bags and throw them into the freezer, when often freezer space is at a premium for most folks. The few lucky ones, like the Huz and I, grew up with parents or grandparents who grew and canned their own vegetables. The rest are pretty clueless, I'm sorry to say.

Abundance

I've just finished reading a book on manifesting, mostly written for the benefit of the people who were a part of the Findhorn community in Scotland. Manifesting is the process of drawing to you either people, opportunities, or things that you need. It seems to work best when you are not anxious about the need or worried about a perceived lack of whatever it is. Often, when you proceed with confidence that you will get what you need, the universe just seems to provide it for you.

Recently for us, this took the form of apricots and cherries from friends, enabling us to make jam and pie filling, as well as eat some outright. No money changed hands; these things were provided for us because others had them and did not need them, and did not plan to use them--or they had so much in excess that they had some to spare. It's been the same with the lambs' quarters, many of which I blanched and froze and put away for winter, in lieu of the spinach we did not get this year due to last year's two fence-spraying fiascos. Gradually, things are coming to us as we need them, and I'm grateful for every leaf and every piece of fruit. While one cannot live on jam and pie filling, it's still food, and food which would otherwise have been a luxury item we would probably have had to decide not to buy this year.

Our heirloom mammoth melting snow peas are doing as well this year as they did last year even with the late start due to the mice eating the newly-planted peas. We're getting a few beans, and I'm hoping for a bumper crop even though I don't have as many bean plants as I'd hoped for. The Roma tomatoes look good, as do the Marmande and Marglobe, and while the beefsteaks are still smaller than we really need them to be, I'm hoping they give us at least one or two meals of stuffed tomatoes. Though the salad is almost gone and the spinach needs to be replanted now, the kale and collard greens are doing great, with large healthy leaves that make the memory of last year's loss seem much more distant.

The really great thing is that we started all of these plants from seed this year--even the four healthy little Rosa Bianca eggplants that I recently transplanted into one of the tall box beds. My only disappointment in planting from seed this year was that the lemon cucumbers aren't doing as well as they did last time, and the Principe Borghese seeds that I got from the wonderful free tomato seed people at Wintersown did not sprout at all, even when I replanted them. Finally, two of the Chinese eggplants they gave me made a late appearance, and now that they're big enough to survive it, I'm going to transplant them into the big box bed as well. Then I'm going to actually freeze a small bag of snow peas--very cool. We did not have enough last year to do more than eat them up as they came. Now I'm about one container ahead of what we're eating, and if it keeps on for just a little while, I should be able to get a few small bags of snow peas into the freezer.

Flat Broke Eating

The post title says it all. So what are we eating, and how can we continue to do so on little to no income? Wild greens are certainly something most people don't consider, but nowadays, we're extremely glad to have them.

Lambs' Quarters, a type of wild spinach, are plentiful right now, thank goodness. It's amazing to think that the current economy has reduced us to partial hunter-gatherer status, but that's the case. You can use Lambs' Quarters for anything you'd use spinach for, and not only do they plant themselves and grow wild, but they're quite nutritious as well. Purslane is another thing I never considered much before now, but these days I'm reading about sauteed purslane and thinking that's got to be next on the menu. The last few days, I gathered several bags of the Lambs' Quarters and am now processing them--steam blanching and freezing them so we'll have them this winter. Even as recently as two years ago, I never thought I'd be pulling weeds and then freezing them for winter eating.

The garden is producing greens in reasonable quantity right now, though the spinach is bolting, so I'll have to pull it and glean all the leaves I can from it, then replant new spinach for fall harvest. And our snow peas are setting flowers, finally, so we should have some pods before long. That'll be a nice change from all the leafy greens.

Eating For Less

Food and the art of feeding a family, whether locavore or not, is a big deal. We want good, healthy food. We want organic or at least pesticide-free food, and heirloom varieties would be greatly preferable. But some people have reported that when they switched to locavore eating, their grocery bills went up. There are various legitimate reasons for this, but I won't go into them just now. Instead, let's look at just how much local food costs, anyway. I have to feed a family of four, so how do I do that on an extremely limited budget?

For one thing, we do not buy boxed cereals anymore. What we do buy is 3 dozen eggs a week, and organic oatmeal in bulk. That, plus local organic whole wheat bread usually suffices to feed us breakfast. We have lots of jam and jelly left from what we canned last year, so that makes toast more exciting if you like jam. I usually have tea and buttered toast, and sometimes eggs. Sometimes I vary that by having tea, eggs and oatmeal instead. It's not five-star dining, but it works as a breakfast, and it doesn't pack a lot of weight on. The oatmeal is way more economical than boxed cereal, and healthier, too, as it doesn't have sugar in it. If you really want to spice it up, you can put cinnamon or maybe a dab of butter and a little milk instead. It's a little bland in taste at first, but you get used to it and then overly-sugared food starts to taste horrible. The last time I tried putting white sugar in my oatmeal, I didn't like the taste of it. When I was a kid, I didn't eat oatmeal without a liberal crust of sugar on top. We're spoiled, we Americans. We don't need half of the sugared-up substances we are currently mistaking for food, and in most if not all cases, we'd be healthier without them.

Lunch can be salad from lettuce and spinach purchased at the farmers market, maybe a ham sandwich (the ham is from less than 200 miles away, bought in the form of a buffet-style ham and then taken by the deli for slicing--it's less per pound that way than just buying the usual brand of deli ham.) Sometimes there's soup started in the crock pot the night before--Idaho grows several different kinds of beans, and they're not too much per pound. Then you add just a bit of rice or barley, which is not local, but necessary if you want your soup to contain a complete protein. The soup might also be something else like potato soup, or carrot, or at this time of year, asparagus.

Now, here's a couple things I learned that I used to be unaware of. You know how most carrots are sold with no tops, even in the farmers markets? Well, that's a shame, because those green tops are completely edible. You just grate the carrots and chop up their tops and put them into the same soup. The tops are good for you and you do not have to waste them. How much did the carrots cost me for the latest batch of soup? Less than $.25, probably, because I grew the carrots myself last year from a $3.00 packet of heirloom seed. They overwintered very well, we got several pots of soup from the carrots in this very small patch, and I just pulled the last few because I need to reclaim the bed so I can plant my beans in a few days.

Asparagus stems are something else that you can get double duty out of. Most people only eat the tender tops and the softer part of the stems, but the tough parts are edible too, if you just simmer them for a few hours until they're softer and can be pureed and then strained. We made an awesome soup from the tough stems of the asparagus that I pickled the other day. The only parts that we threw away were the very bottom of the stems, the part that is whitish-purple and extremely tough to cut even with a sharp knife. The rest of the asparagus, we used in one way or another. How much is the asparagus? Currently $1.59 per pound, and a couple weeks earlier in the season it was only $1.39 per pound. But I've pickled ten pints and still have a few pints left over from the dozen I did last year. I'll get a little more of it to freeze, but right now we're also enjoying it fresh.

Greens: right now the farmers markets are selling bags of spinach, lettuce, arugula, etc. for around $4.00 per bag. I'm not sure how much this comes to in pounds, but we've eaten salad several times this week, and I still haven't gone through all the salad greens I bought yet. We'll do stir fry tomorrow (Friday) for a change, and Saturday's the farmer's market. Last week I spent about $26.00 for various things at the market including greens, leeks and green onions. At a store with local produce, I spent another $15.00 on asparagus for pickling and eating fresh. We've eaten off this food all week long. A few items we've eaten, like the organic bread, is not purchased at the market, and the Huz has been buying pre-shaved cheese to make pizzas and calzones, but so far this year, the farmers market has provided over half of the main ingredients for our dinners and some lunches, and we have not spent more than thirty dollars there in any given week. I'm estimating our weekly food budget at less than $100.00 for four people, so far. Remember that the asparagus wasn't all for eating this week; some of it was pickled, so not all of that $15.00 was part of this week's food budget. In budgeting for food, a locavore has to remember to get some to put away for when the food's out of season. If you don't freeze or pickle asparagus in April or May, you won't have any in November. Our grandparents used to know this, but many of us have forgotten. It's time to remember.

On a side note: I can't believe the WinCo is shipping in asparagus from Mexico when right now asparagus is local and in season, and cheaper per pound. It makes no sense at all. (Local asparagus: $1.59/pound. Mexican asparagus: $1.99/pound. Do the math.)

I guess the main tip for today is to find out which parts of a vegetable are actually edible, and not throw away anything that might be food. Cut down on the wastage in any way you can, and you'll have more options for things to feed your family. Who knew asparagus stem soup or carrot top soup could be so good?

Tomato Seedlings

I've finished transplanting the tomato seedlings into their own separate pots. I started them off two to a pot, in case one of the seeds didn't come up, and now they're all at least an inch high, and some of them are nearly three inches. So I separated the twins and moved them into their own four-inch peat or coconut fiber pots. They'll go from these straight into the ground in mid-may. Normally, I would have already transplanted them in early April, but since I planted my seeds a little late this year, we're not as far along as we would be normally. But that's okay.

Since my experience last year, I'm getting better at recognizing signs of a baby tomato needing more nutrients. When they're still a healthy green but showing the faintest signs of their leaves tending to change in color toward a slightly olive tinge, that's a sign that they need more nutrients, like Miracle Grow or similar. Last year I did not know what was going on when the leaves began to turn yellow, but this year I'm all over it before it becomes a problem or stunts the growth of my tomatoes. This means a person who wants to head off a nutrient deficiency in baby tomatoes needs to pay very careful attention to the color of the leaves. It actually helps to have seen the plants when they're nutrient-starved, so I know what the difference in color looks like. Suffice it to say for those who haven't seen this, a tomato plant that is healthy and getting plenty of nutrients is nice and richly green. The color is vibrant and unmistakable. Any tendency toward an olive-green or yellow tinge to the leaves means that the plant is starving for nutrients, especially minerals like nitrogen, calcium or magnesium. Their color will start to go off long before they are in serious distress from the lack, giving you enough time to supplement their water with Miracle Grow or something else before the plants start failing. Tonight when I transplanted the babies into their own pots, I noticed a slight color change in some of the ones who'd been sharing a pot with a sibling, so I know that now that they're in their own pots, a little extra snack might give them a necessary pick-me-up. I also planted them with the dirt up around their stems a little higher, which will encourage them to put more energy into roots and not shoot up long and spindly. If all goes well, by the time I get them into the ground, they should be of a reasonable size and hardy enough to live out their lives in the garden.

In the next couple of days, I'm going to be fixing up their garden spots, adding crushed eggshell for calcium and finished compost for valuable nutrients. I'll add a little of our extra topsoil to make up for what came out of the bed when last year's dead plants were pulled up, and the beds should be ready to receive their new tenants when the time comes.

Furry Little Thieves

The mice are stealing my peas right out of the ground. They don't even wait for the plants to come up; they just dig the peas out of the ground after I've planted them. I heard that mice don't like mint, so I've strewn peppermint all over the areas where I planted the pea plants; I'm hoping some are still left in the ground and that this will allow them to actually come up and form pea plants. Otherwise, I'm not sure what we'll do.

I tried to bargain with the mice. I actually went out and sat near their area for a while, and talked to them. (Yeah, I know this makes me sound completely loony, but I had to try it anyway.) I told them they could share the wild sunflower seed with the birds the way they did last year, and if they stayed in their area, I'd leave the last few peas alone for them or even shell them and put them in their area for them to find. But it seems they don't understand me. One even came up onto the picnic table on the patio, and when I switched on the light, it sat there for a moment, staring at me with its big eyes--and this was within an hour of my attempts to communicate with them. I wasn't sure whether they were taking me up on my offer or defying me, but within three days, there was the evidence of more peas stolen from the planter boxes. So much for trying to work with them, Findhorn-style. Sigh. The Huz put out poison for them, and I hate to do that, but if they keep stealing the seed, none of us will have any of those delicious snow peas we enjoyed so very much last year. Unfortunately, what we will have is more mice.

Thank goodness they don't seem to care about the bean, cucumber, or carrot seeds. But I'll be very disappointed if we don't get any peas at all. They fed us all summer long last year; in September, we were still getting heirloom snow peas.

Sprouting Life

Yes! The seedlings are coming up. First it was the Chamomile, then the Carantan leeks and green onions. Then the cilantro and regular onions. Now the tomatoes are starting to come up--the ones from the free heirloom tomato seed I planted. So far, I have one Beefsteak, a Marglobe and a Marmande, (both great midsized slicing varieties), and the first of the Roma tomatoes. I also noticed that the parsley has broken the surface. No eggplants or peppers yet, but they'll probably be soon. I was a little late in planting this year, but the seedlings are every bit as important as ever--probably more so because we don't have the budget to buy already-started plants from a nursery unless we absolutely have no other choice.

Outside today, I caught the first glimpse of the tiny new spinach seedlings beginning to come up in the garden bed near the east fence--the same bed where we recently had to pull up all of last year's already-rapidly-growing spinach due to its contamination during the Boy Scout fence-spraying fiasco. My blessings on the new spinach seedlings; may they come on fast and hard and with ever-increasing vigor. May they grow rapidly to an edible size and then persist without bolting well into early summer, so that I can both feed my family and also freeze some for next winter's food. With our finances stretched so very thin, our little backyard garden has never been more vital to our survival.

Beyond the concerns of my own family, backyard gardens in general have also never been more vital. We all need to remember that, as genetically modified food continues to sicken and fatten people and endanger human life on the whole. I recently read about how the introduction of peanut genes into the most common variety of tomato used in many fast-food restaurants has already caused health concerns for people. Poor, unsuspecting people went to the fast-food place to grab a burger and happily munched down, never knowing that their tomatoes contained peanut genes. What's the problem with that? Well, it's a heck of a big problem if you happen to be severely allergic to peanuts! Think about it. They've let the genie out of the bottle, folks, and we may never be able to put it back. But we can at least try to curtail its effects by supporting heirloom seed companies, growing our own gardens and buying from local, organic and heirloom variety farmers. The only thing these big agribusinesses see or understand is money, so let's put the issue to them in a way they'll understand. Just say "no" to big agribusiness, huge chain grocery stores and suppliers (pushers) of genetically modified seeds. Vote with your hard-earned dollars and support people who care enough to support the planet. In so doing, you'll be saving your own health, and helping to save the health and ultimately the lives of future generations.

Vernal Equinox

It's the vernal equinox--or it was, on Friday. I got out the pots and the potting soil, and mixed it with a little topsoil. My seed-starting setup is almost ready. It seems fitting to plant seeds on the Vernal Equinox, even if that's technically a little late to begin. I'm not at all worried about that. It'll be fine. The best part was that the night air was in the high forties, so it felt reasonably warm outside while I mixed the soil, and the night air smelled wonderful. This year, there should be no chemical menace from either the neighbors or the Boy Scouts of America. It's spring, and it's time for a fresh start.

Free Seeds and a Natural Root Cellar

It's that time of year again; time to start the new seedlings. Actually, I probably should have started them sooner, but I think I jumped the gun just a little last year. It seemed like it took so long before I could finally get the seedlings into the ground last year that this year, I just felt like waiting a little longer before starting them. I'll be doing that this weekend, so I need to make sure I have all my pots ready and my whole setup ready for them. I'll need to buy a new gooseneck lamp to hold the sunlight bulb, because the other one fell or something and broke. Not looking forward to spending the money for a new lamp, but since we don't have any south-facing windows and the best window to start plants in is an east-facing one, I don't see another choice. I'll just get the cheapest one I can find that will do the job.

The younger daughter is going to help me plan and care for the garden this year, and she'll be helping plan local produce meals as well. We sat down one night and picked out which varieties of heirloom tomatoes we'd try this year, and sent off for some free tomato seeds from a wonderful website called www.wintersown.org. All it cost us was printing and filling out a form, and sending it to them with a SASE included. In return we got a decent number of tomato seeds of different varieties, and if even most of them sprout, that will be fantastic. With money as tight as it is right now, I'm just glad we already had so many seeds left over from last year. I needed to spend as little as possible on seed this year. Spinach seed, at least, is not a problem, as I saved seed from last year's plants and it comes up beautifully. I was also able to save a little winter kale seed and some radish seed. I had a couple different varieties of spinach seed and a couple different types of radishes, but I don't really care if the seed turns out to be a hybrid between the two varieties. It's all good, and it's naturally pollinated, not Frankenseed.

Also, I just pulled out several good carrots from the garden spot. They're perfect; no problem from having been kept in the ground all winter. So the problem of how to store carrots all winter isn't really a problem at all--I just have to get them whenever the ground is soft enough to dig them out without damage to them and the garden implements. Yesterday, they came out of the ground with just a smidge of wiggling, and I'm really looking forward to some of that good carrot/dill soup. There aren't any tops to speak of, but that's okay. It'll still be great.

Chicken Followup

Not a huge lot to tell here. I took it out of its package. I rinsed it with water. I winced at the way it felt in my hands and the way watery blood poured out of it along with with the water, but I got it into its roasting pan and sprinkled it with salt, pepper, sage, rosemary, garlic, and onion powder. The kids laughed at my antics, especially when the lid didn't want to sit down on the pot because the leg bones were sticking up--just like that scene in Overboard. But at least the chicken was already plucked and didn't have feet--because that would have been really gross. I cooked it for about 2 1/2 hours total, and it seems completely done and tender. It looks a lot less like a raw, dead carcass, thank goodness. But I still haven't cut it apart. I'll just let people carve things off it until the Huz comes home and decides to de-bone it. He'll only be gone another two days, so since it's cooked, it'll keep that long. I'm sure this won't be the only time I'll have to deal with dead poultry, and I'm sure I can do better, given time. It's just that the more time goes by, the less animal protein appeals to me. It tastes good, but it comes with too much baggage. Or maybe that's just me. Oh, well, I never claimed to be the perfect omnivore.

And then for some reason I just had to watch a vampire movie on HBO tonight. (Shakes head.)

I can't wait to plant the vegetable garden. Even so, it's just weird that no matter what, if we want to eat and live, something has to die, even if it's just a carrot. I think I prefer fruit; the apple might be consumed, but unless something went horribly wrong, the apple tree is still alive when we're done.

Go Cook a Chicken

Oh. My. Goodness. I am forty-two years old and have almost zero experience in cooking whole poultry. As in, plucked, hollow, sans head and feet, and frozen. Well, thawed, now. I can't remember ever cooking a whole chicken before, and the one time I tried to cook a turkey, it wasn't pretty. I'm used to cooking them after they've been cut up (by someone else, obviously) into their various parts. I have next to no idea what to do with a whole chicken carcass. I like my meat pre-cut, skinned, and pre-packaged. The easier to pretend is isn't really meat, my dear. I do not like this idea of handling and cutting apart a dead chicken carcass. It's disturbing me on so many levels. Maybe I should become a vegetarian. Except that I can't be a vegetarian--my body seems to crave meat protein on a regular basis; I just don't like to be reminded that what I'm eating was once a live bird or animal. I'm stressing out right now about this dead chicken. And it was even a free-range chicken, humanely processed. It just wasn't quite processed enough for me. All of my married life, I either bought pre-cut and skinned chicken, or the Huz cut it up and cooked it while I tried not to watch. But the Huz isn't at home right now, and will be away until the end of the week. He thawed out this chicken on Saturday and left it for me to deal with...and I've got...stage fright, or something. I'm pathetic. And the really sad thing is, I know I'm not alone. I know that many of my fellow Americans are likewise ignorant of such a basic thing as how to cut up a chicken carcass.

Gulp. I'm going to go do what the Huz said. I'm going to rinse it with water, put it in a roaster pan, sprinkle some salt, pepper and herbs on it and put it in a 350 degree oven for two-plus hours. Forget this cut-apart-the-carcass business! Yech. I'm being a total chicken about cutting up this poor dead chicken. But I can't waste it; it's food, and it cost money. Ahhhh.... Well, everyone has their quirks, I guess. Shudder.

Seeds

Wow, Heirloom Seeds is already closed for Spring orders! Last year, I bought seeds in...February, I think. Or maybe January. This year I was trying to wait a little and not be quite so anxious, since last year I had to keep my little plants in peat pots for so long waiting for the weather to be warm enough to plant them outside. This year, I thought I'd let another couple of weeks go by before starting my seeds inside, but...I should have ordered seeds before now. I am excited that so many people want heirloom seeds, though. And I just checked over my supply of seeds from last year and I have almost everything I need for this year. I just need to choose which main variety of tomato I'm going to grow this time, and find a new variety of green cucumber. Last year, I used a hybrid called Spacemaster, and it did not do as well as I hoped, even in the shade of my apple tree. The heirloom variety that Baker Seed sent me for free with an order, Lemon Cucumber, did extremely well and even tried climbing up the apple tree as a support. So I think I'll order them on purpose this time, and pick a new green cuke to satisfy the Huz, who likes his pickles mean and green.

Winter Greens

Okay, so I admit that the title of this post is mostly there for the play-on-words factor. But I really did use some greens to cook with tonight. It was frozen spinach with barley, rice, and tomato juice, cooked into a soup with chopped leftover beef. I'd have put in some carrot but the ground was frozen again.

So what do a broke locavore's pantry shelves look like at the end of January? Not too bad, yet. We still have some pickles (both cucumber and asparagus), peaches, assorted jams and jellies, green beans, a little canned tomato juice, frozen spinach, frozen asparagus, frozen beef and chicken, and two or three squashes and mini pumpkins. And then there's all those dried beans, rice, and barley. We still have whole spelt grain that we bought a big bag of several years ago, and it was in a bucket tightly sealed enough that it didn't go rancid, so we are still able to grind it and use it. We're still able to buy local potatoes, winter squashes and onions, and I don't think the local apples have run out, either. We're just having to get creative as to what we make, how often, and with what supplies. But it does make me extremely grateful that we preserved food last year. I'm not sure what we'd do without it--unless the answer is to eat yet more dried beans.

Now I need to start soaking more seeds for sprouts. If I can do enough varieties at once, we can make sprout salad later this week.

Not Quite Guinness

I've now made Irish soda bread several times, and while I have no idea how great it is by Irish standards, by my family's standards, it's delicious. But it's definitely better when you use the buttermilk you get from churning butter instead of the thicker, creamy cultured stuff in the jug at the supermarket. Whatever that stuff is, it's not buttermilk. The bread comes out okay, but...just okay. Having made it both ways, I kid you not--there's a difference. So I guess we get soda bread just twice a month, since that's how often I churn butter, and it only yields enough buttermilk for one loaf of soda bread and a tiny bit left to put in pancake mix in the morning.

My daughter commented last week that our pantry looks empty compared to how it used to look. She's right. I recently reorganized it, and there's a lot less of certain things, such as commercially produced cans of food. There are more bags of beans, some flour, jams and jellies the Huz and I processed...things like that. But a lot less of the ready-made food that the kids were wont to eat for their lunches. I can't remember when we last had a can of Campbell's soup. We've been making all our own soup for weeks or even months now. It's mostly bean soup, but there is also the occasional treat, like the carrot soup I made last night after digging up a few of the carrots out in the garden. It's the perfect root cellar. When the ground's frozen solid, you can't get them out without great damage to trowel and carrot. But when it hovers just around the freezing point or a little above, then the earth loosens its grip and you can tease the carrots out. Last night I got a big fat orange one I didn't know was there--it hadn't much top left, but the root was pretty hefty. That and the larger of the white ones I dug last time made the soup. I watered it down some and then added more onion, garlic and dill to flavor it, and ended up with just enough soup for each person to have two bowls. Needless to say, the soup did not last the night, so today, everyone was hungry again with no ready-made food available. And I haven't had time to make any bread but the soda bread, so I need to bake regular whole-wheat bread tonight.

It's hard to look into the fridge and not see much food there. But we had a bit of stew meat thawed out in the meat drawer, and a few smaller carrots left over from my garden foraging the day before, so again I turned to my Irish cookbook. There's a stew recipe that you make from stew meat chunks and carrot chunks, and it fit perfectly the materials I had available. I had one onion left, since I haven't been anywhere to buy onions over the past couple of weeks, but that and some garlic went into the stew. And then we needed a can of Guinness. A can of Guinness! Not something we happened to have sitting around--like my homemade meatloaf, they don't tend to hang around in the house long on the rare occasions we have them. But there was some other kind of beer that hadn't been gotten into for months--not quite what was wanted, but reasonable. So we used it in the recipe in place of the Guinness. It'll probably be great. Anyway, once again we're about to have a feast made from almost nothing. Oh, and I do have a small crock pot of beans cooking, so we can make more of those burritos we liked.

When I look at that near-empty fridge, I have to remember that there's actually more food than it looks like--it's just that we have to cook almost everything from scratch now, so there's fewer of the ready-made things that we used to take for granted. And it might also be that the from-scratch food is so much more delicious that it's just getting decimated where before, leftovers used to sit for a week or more. Now they get eaten up within a couple of days. Just a couple of days in the life of a family on a tight budget and a couple of kids on growth spurts.

From Scratch

While I was helping my younger daughter finish up her sixth-grade material for her correspondence school, we had to make our own refried beans for a project/assignment on the Aztecs. I'd never made refried beans before--they were always something that came out of a can. But make them we did, and the corn tortillas, too. I used up the last of our black beans, and they were surprisingly good.

Now we've done it again, and this time it wasn't for an assignment. I cooked some Idaho-grown pink beans in the smaller slow cooker. Then I mashed them up like I did the black beans and fried them in a pan with a little extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO). We made them into burritos using thin-sliced and chopped Idaho ham and shredded Idaho cheddar, and commercial whole-wheat tortillas made without saturated fat, trans fat, or hydrogenated oils. So everything but the tortillas and EVOO qualified as local.

I think the thing that surprised me the most (after the taste, which was out-of-this-world delicious) was how easy it really was to make the refried beans. At this point, I don't know whether it was actually cheaper to make our own or buy the cans, since I haven't done the math yet. But it was fun and delicious, and this way the beans were local. That, and they had no additives to speak of. No preservatives, no salt, and no spices that the Huz is allergic to. Just beans, water, and EVOO. Those burritos were easily twice as good as anything we've purchased at any of the fast-food Tex-Mex chain restaurants. It was such a wonderful change from bean soup. We all liked them so much we couldn't stop eating them...until we ran out of tortillas, anyway.

Jack -O-Tureen

At this point, with the economy being what it is, I can't afford to waste anything that might be food for my family. That includes pumpkins intended as Halloween jack-o-lanterns that were never actually carved.

The week of Halloween, I was swamped with book revisions, among other things. I managed to take the kids to the pumpkin patch to pick out pumpkins for jack-o-lanterns, and I even brought back a pumpkin myself, plus four little pie pumpkins. But I didn't manage to get my pumpkin carved. As a last-ditch attempt at Halloween decoration, I took out a black Sharpie and drew eyes and a mouth on my pumpkin, then set it outside the front door.

That pumpkin sat through November and December in the nice cool garage because I really didn't know what to do with it. I mean...we've always associated pumpkins with pie and custard and little else. But then I remembered that Barbara Kingsolver, according to her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, had tried to make pumpkin soup in the pumpkin's own shell. (Apparently, the pumpkin collapsed, but the soup was great.) Well, by this time in early January, my family was still willing to eat bean soup but getting a bit tired of it. I had a Deborah Madison cookbook with the recipe for making pumpkin soup in the pumpkin shell, and I had a big ex-Halloween pumpkin that I had never intended for food. We all had a craving for some kind of food that was different from the ever-present bean soup. So I tried that recipe.

I hollowed out the pumpkin and scraped the innards out, then had my older daughter pick out all the seeds for roasting later. Then I rubbed the inside of the pumpkin with salt and set it aside. The milk mixture, I had to cobble together from a couple of cans of evaporated milk, since all we buy is 1% and the recipe called for whole milk. But I did have a bit of cream on hand for making butter, so I used just a little of that in with the rest of the milk, which I reconstituted by adding water. I used my big roaster pan to set the pumpkin in so that if it collapsed it wouldn't be lost to us entirely. Then I left it in the hot oven for about an hour or a little more, and crossed my fingers.

Low and behold, it came out intact. All it did is sag just a little on one side, and I think that's because I left it in maybe just a little too long. But when I scraped its sides, it didn't collapse, and it held the soup and pulp just fine. The pulp was a little stringy, so when we had lowered the soup level a little, I went ahead and pureed the last of the liquid and pulp together until it was creamy and smooth. My younger daughter loved it and the oldest even found it likable enough, though they both preferred the smooth, pureed variety. The Huz liked it with the pulp intact. Shrug. To each his own. I agree with the kids; I prefer it pureed smooth.

In any case, it worked, and it was food, and at least one Halloween pumpkin didn't go to waste this year. But because it wore a jack-o-lantern's face, it also wore that face into the oven. It made a humerous sight sitting there in the roaster pan with its crescent-moon eyes and its little surprised "o" of a mouth, with aluminum foil draped over its head to hide one eye while supporting the lid we'd cut out of its top. From pumpkin to jack-o-lantern to soup tureen. I'd say it led a full life.