Carrots

I still have edible carrots in one of my outdoor garden boxes, after leaving them there the whole winter. It was like having a little root cellar, and yesterday I went out and dug up several of the carrots that were still in the ground. Tonight I'm making them into soup.

Fresh carrots, available right out of the ground after a winter of being left outside, with new, growing green tops and everything. I'm not sure they'd be fantastic for just gnawing on as they are, but grated and made into carrot-and-dill soup, they'll be perfect.

The ability to pull carrots out of the ground after a winter's outdoor storage...amazing. The ability to feed my family a nutritious dinner without having to run to the grocery store...priceless.

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?