Painting with plants

Exactly what I am doing with the garden? The aim is for it to be beautiful and edible. I will be sharing and caring for wildlife hopefully creating mutual beneficial relationships.

My resources in space and energy are limited but that does not mean I cannot garden, preserve and champion.

The front garden is a typical country cottage garden but instead of seeing the garden from the outside to its best advantage, it’s at its best looking from inside because that’s where I am mostly. 

Last autumn my helpers planted over 200 bulbs and it’s a spectacle to behold. The bees have plenty of flowers to visit while I plan additions to the garden that will be edible. So far amongst the flowers we have rhubarb, artichoke and rosemary but more planned. 

The back patuo which is accessible provides a salad garden mostly with edible flowers. Going around the space in my wheelchair provides exercise, fresh air and sunshine. Everything we need to grow.

How to establish your rhythm of life

What rhythm of life is appropriate to you and how to find out what is it?

STAGES OF LIFE

There are a number of stages in our life and to accept and know which one we live in now can help us tweak the energy we have. Children have a need for routine, adolescents need sleep to function properly, young adults, active in the workplace, young parents, the 30 age group, 40, 50, 60, 70 etc.Each stage of life brings challenges with it, You might be following that linear path as it unfolds or like me navigate between them.

Questions relating to each stage :

SLEEP( night)

How many hours of sleep do you need for optimum energy?
Do you sleep the required number of hours and if not what is stopping you?
If you were to sleep the required number of hours what would be the impact on your energy?
If you cannot sleep the required number can you build in a nap in the day?

Our daily rhythms vary and although I know I am at my optimum energy when having had a good 8 hours uninterrupted nighttime sleep  my teenage sons require about 12 hours and are a lot more present if I accept their rhythm. That means that their breakfast time is my lunch time and our main meal in the evening is their lunch time and that at 9 pm they are likely to need a snack. Even if it means we have different daily rhythms they meet at certain points.

ACTIVITIES( Day)

How  many hours does it take you to do your work?
when is the best time for you to use available optimum energy?
Does your commute add time to that?
Do you take time to be present when you eat a nourishing meal?
Are there seasonal changes to this pattern?( Winter and autumn)

WEEK
How do I use the time at weekends? (Could be catching up on sleep)
Is there balance in my work and play?

SEASONS

There can be very little variation on how we currently use our energy during the seasons and every week seems like another but it was not always so.
Spring was a time of planting new seeds, new life, growth after a period of fasting and as the workload increased so did the length of the day. With the convenience of electric light we can modify that but do we use the time to its optimum?
Summer was a time for tending the growing plants, eat fruits in season, socialising and usually a time to work and play at maximum capacity. Summer is the time of plenty, warm, long days.
Autumn is a time of harvest and preparing for colder weather by processing the harvest and ensuring we will have our needs met in the colder days. Autumn offers us ambiguous days that remind us of summer but also of the winter ahead.
Winter offers us the shortest amount of daylight hours and an opportunity to see if the fruits of our labours do indeed carry us through to the next season. Harvests are limited but it can be a time to slow down a little, stay warm, coset ourselves a bit and plan and gain strength for the year ahead.

YEARS

Each year and each period in our life has its own demands and thinking of what is important and what is authentic to us we can live with each 'now' in harmony or discord.

Somehow this century we have challenged these rhythms of life by working day and night, every day of the week, eating everything whenever we wanted, anytime in the name of progress. We rarely notice a change of season or pace getting out in all weathers, to accomplish our life's work paced over the seasons of the year instead of over 365 days.

A step towards change to ponder:

Start by finding out how many hours of sleep are most beneficial for you and make it a habit to get the sleep you need.( it fluctuates with age, health issues, effect of nutrition etc)
Can you give yourself a day of rest each week and plan activities that will nourish you?

Its an ongoing movement towards doing our life's work and staying present in the 'now' noticing the time of day, day of the week, seasons and how we function at our optimum level. It is a challenge but enables us to make our lives meaningful.

Marmalade time

The Seville oranges are back and our first preserve to fill the pantry this year will be Orange Marmalade.

A step by step visual recipe for you to enjoy.

The promise of a seed

Having decided what vegetables to grow and poured over a variety of seed catalogues, choices have been made and today, the seeds have arrived. This year instead of buying them from the gardencenter , the seeds have been chosen from the real seed company because the seeds are true to type and hopefully will not only produce the named variety but also be used to create our own seeds for next year. Not practical probably for all seeds but important to continue to grow vegetables in the future.

Each packet comes with growing instructions and instructions on how to save seed. Currently, you could be spending a lot of money on seed varieties that promise a bumper crop but then cannot be reproduced as the seeds are genetically programmed to produce a harvest but not seeds. This guarantees seed producers a constant demand each year for new seed.

Gardeners have always saved seed from their produce and produced lasting and enduring results in gardens and allotments and with a little care, we too could be building up a seed bank. Companies like Monsanto genetically engineer seeds to produce the most yield but these plants do not produce seeds true to type and thus farmers and gardeners are dependant and compelled to purchase seeds each year for their business. It is quite likely that tomatoes and peppers found in the supermarket come from genetically modified seeds.

To store the seeds we use an office concertina file with 12 tabs for each month of the year and the seedpackets are slotted into each month of sowing. That way at the beginning of each month, sowing seeds is easily identified and if succession planting is required, it gets put back into the following month. April currently seems like the busiest month for sowing seeds.

Resources


the real seed company
organic gardening catalogue
sarah raven
seeds of change ( USA)

Damsons

A winter tipple in the making and maybe your next weekend project?
Our village is full with octogenarians and beyond and even the gravestones mark 93 years, 94 years so there has to be something in the air. The secret I found out, is a regular tipple in the winter.

I have been writing a small article in our village magazine over the last few months and people have began to bring in produce as both gifts and challenges. Can I do anything with it? Will I share? I love these impromptu gifts of appreciation ( at least that is the spirit in which I receive them). They could just as well be a last resort for a glut of produce, but I am happy either way. The garden at the shop produces a small amount of food and I am only too pleased to take on surplus from our excellent local gardeners.

Today, a box of damsons arrived. Hmm, damson jam, damson jelly, damson cheese.....hold on, damson gin that sounds a bit more like it. As we recently cleared the large sweet jars from the top shelf they seemed the perfect jar to start with. Its easy really, you need gloves, a toothpick, a jar, sugar and gin. You prick the damsons, put them in the sterilised pot, add sugar ( as you go) and top up with gin. Stick in a dark cupboard for 3 months. Visit every few days to shake the jar and in 3 months time, when all the sugar has melted you will be left with a lovely liquid.Strain off the damsons, pour the alcohol through a funnel into a dry warm sterilised bottle and seal. Just an ideal home made present for Christmas. A more formal recipe follows :

Damson Gin

450g of damsons
710ml of vodka or gin
350g caster sugar

Where are the bees?

No bees, no fruits? No beans?
It is remarkable at the moment that the weather is off track, the plants are unsure what to do about it and a synchronicity of flowering, pollinating and fruit is far from easy to obtain presently.
We obtain our local honey from an enthusiast. He has been telling us for the last six months that he is unsure whether the bees will survive the climate change and when he came in this week, he glumly told us that 50% of his hives had not managed to survive the winter. 50% is a huge amount.
What seemed a possibility is now a certainty in our area : bee populations are severely damaged and this can only mean that British honey will die off and we will need to import our honey from the rest of the world at a premium cost. If we have no bees pollinating the orchards and fields, our crops will diminish and as such, farmers will have a harder time managing to create value crops. As a result of less insects too, birds will require us to supplement their diets with seeds and worms to keep them thriving.
If you love honey, go buy some as British honey may indeed become a rarity in the future.

You can have cake

Cake takes on a whole new meaning.

6 months have passed since stepping into a supermarket for my foodshopping. In fact this week I reflected on the fact that I have lost touch with consumer mania of too many choices for supper, impulse food buying and being influenced by adverts.

The local shop has only 10 varieties of cereal ( heavens can we survive a choice of 10 against about 45 in the supermarket). We can have fresh seasonal vegetables and fruit delivered while we wait for the garden to take shape.

The ingredients have simplified and I am discovering that moving to a vegetarian diet may be a better possibility.I have talked about this in the past but had very little personal knowledge of where to start.

This week I visited a nutritionist and discovered the shocking truth that our diet here is based on a lot of wheat, corn, sugar and fats and that toxicity levels in the food available in shops is far too high to create a healthy environment for our bodies. Did you know that cucumbers carry a higher than normal aluminium level?

I am therefore cooking in unknown territory and the ingredients before me are not the usual ones I have been cooking with. The aim is to store some dry ingredients that hold more complex nutrients and minerals . These will not perish as fast as the usual foods, frozen or canned and will provide a good base food in the future. They will take longer to digest and longer to release their nutrients in the bloodstream. We should feel fuller, longer and less inclined to go for sugar fixes and bars of chocolate. ( I don't mind the latter one!)

Today, I made a cake with lots of seeds, no fats or eggs or sugar and surprisingly it worked and tasted quite good. Its consistency is that of bread pudding. I say quite good because my tastebuds were expecting something else. I felt like one of my sons who says' I do not like that' before trying it but even one of the boys had a bite from the cake and said it was quite good.

So what was in it :
Brown rice flour
whole wheat flour
rolled oats
linseeds
sunflower seeds
pumpkin seeds
sesame seeds
flaked almonds
ginger grated
raisins
cinnamon
ginger spice
rice milk

Not the usual cake ingredients of fat, sugar, flour and eggs, not dripping in sugar icing either. Best of all,we could have cake and eat it. Seeds are not just for birds.....

Some welcome wiggly news....

What a fantastic moral boost after the budget post to receive the new Wiggly Wigglers catalogue today in the post entitled ' a fork full of country', the first social media catalogue of the century.

OK, hands up, I am talking about it not only because I love what Wiggly Wigglers stand for, the people behind it and the products it holds, and the authentic way they do business but because ( pss I am in it as a Wiggly Person'). I got soo excited when it came through the door , carried in by our local postman. I was busy delving into the stockroom but yelled. Roger came out to see what was the matter fearing I had fallen over ( that happens regularly when my brain has a funny moment), but no, he was not reassured seeing my smile, my genuine excitement at what was in the catalogue. ( I do not get excited about catalogues in the post on a regular basis but this one has been the longest time awaiting a historic event since I was pregnant and waiting for the delivery of a small bundle of joy.)

So, we opened it, I got a rush of the blushes and went suddenly shy. Roger read it and then could not stop telling people ' ask her about Wiggly Wigglers! with a smirk on his face! So now, there is a rush in the shop of people asking to see the catalogue, read it, and hopefully by word of mouth we will spread some good news, some news that will tickle the farmer in you and allow us to throw some wellies in celebration.

What could be so different about the catalogue :

The new mail order catalogue ' A forkful of country' due on doorsteps in March, was built with contributions from customers and friends around the world using social media. Building on their base of composting and wildlife gardening products, Heather Gorringe ( a Nuffield Scholar) and her team wanted to broaden their reach in terms of products and customers. Not content with traditional market research, Heather turned to Social Media to engage customers and others she met on her study and speaking tours around the world. Many of the ideas for new products and much of the content was built using a wiki ( i.e. server software used to freely create and edit web content using any web browser). Anyone with a password would have their say from Australia to the States to deepest South Wales. The resulting array of products includes everything from the traditional, sturdy garden spades, instant vegetable gardens, eco cleaning products, herb based lotions to chicken houses and peg bags. The new catalogue is presented in a scrap-book style, packed full of clippings, quotes, family snaps as well as the more traditional professional photography and product descriptions. You finish reading and you want a piece of this thing called Wiggly Wigglers. Businesses struggling with the concept of an authentic voice need to take a leaf out of this groundbreaking catalogue.

Here is the difficult bit though, I guess the server will be inundated with requests so if you cannot wiggle one online, you may have to give them a call by phoning 01981 500391. I promise you, you will not be disappointed. Its fully recyclable when you have read it, but I would say, reuse it again and again, share it with others and keep it on the bookshelf. It will be a collectors item.

With a new spring in my step, a smile on my face and inspired by Wiggly Wigglers, I am putting the wellies on. I am off to the garden to make my dream become a reality. With a little help from my wiggly friends......Be inspired, be very inspired......

Oh and pass it on please......

Quince, the golden apple

Having been given some quinces last week and enjoyed their decorative value in the fruitbasket, time came to make them into something useful, pretty and edible.

People say that for the Greeks and Romans, quinces were the golden apples of Hesperides, the golden apples that prevented Atalanta winning the race. The quince was the golden apple that Paris awarded Aphrodite- which is very suitable as it was after all her fruit. The fruit of love, marriage and fertility. This is the scent in spring of the beginning of love. There are more references to quinces and love such as in the poem written by Shafer ben Utman al -Mustafi in 982.

It is yellow in colour, as if it wore a daffodil
tunic, and it smells like musk, a penetrating smell.
It has perfume of a loved woman and the same
hardness of heart, but it has the colour of the
impassioned and scrawny lover.
( extract)

And you can imagine the quince being the fruit in the story of the three golden apples.

Its a fruit with history, myth and its colour and perfume delight if you can see past the hard and unattractive shell.

There are very few recipes about what to do with quinces in english recipes but I imagine there may be quite some recipes in Persian and mediteranean cuisine. I have started with making quince jelly and delighted at the salmon pale colour of the flesh and the rich clear liquid that boiled up made an exquisite jelly. If you have access to a lot of quinces you could make membrilo and quince paste which goes well with cheese. Its a long stir and watching over the pot to ensure that it does not burn in the bottom of the pan but makes an excellent Christmas present in a pretty box.

Canning apples

Canning Season

Last year was great and this year will be better I feel. Not because the harvest is bigger but because having done it at least once, I feel more confident in my canning abilities.

Canning is not something that is done in the UK although in France it is the norm. Supplies are difficult to get over here so I have had to be a little creative in getting things together. Some suppliers were not happy shipping to the UK, or would only do so via a Canadian relative ( which was stretching relations a bit) and in the end, I chose to make a large investment order with Lehmans. I did not but a water bath canner but found a very large stock pot instead, in which the holder would sit easily. I ordered a variety of pint jars, quart jars , 8 oz and 4 oz jars. The quart jars are great for soups, stock, plums and applesauce. Pint size is OK but we are a large family so will take about 2 to 3 portions and the smaller ones are used for jams, jellies, salsa and pizza sauce.

It was a bit of a bureaucracy to order via Lehmans. Their service note is excellent, but you can only pay via bank order ( which incurs a charge and you have to add their banking charge too(, then when you get the goodies delivered, expect an invoice from customs to pay duty when you are enjoying your products.

I bought a pressure canner which was expensive to ship and purchase and have not actually progressed to that as yet, its on the list specifically for stews, soups and stock.

Canning applesauce is great and very satisfying. I used the Complete Book of Home Preserving by Ball, providing an array of recipes and instructions on how long things should be in the water bath.

For 8 pints or 4 quarts jars of applesauce :

12 lbs apples
water
3 cups of sugar
4 tablespoons of lemon juice

1. Prepare canner and lids
2. In a large saucepan combine your apples with enough water to stop them sticking and stew gently until they are the consistency you like. ( 5 to 20 mins depending on variety).
3. Add sugar and lemon juice; bring to the boil and keep on a gentle boil while filling jars.
4. Ladle hot sauce into jars leaving 1/2 inch( 1 cm) of headspace. Remove air bubbles by using a spatula around the sides of the jar.Wipe rim, centre lid on jar and screw band down until you meet with resistance.
5. Place jars in the canner ensuring that they are completely covered in water. process 1 pt and quart jars for 20 minutes. Remover canner lid, wait 5 mins, remove jars, cool and store.

With the first batch, some applesauce came out as cooked applesauce is larger in volume than chunks so you will need to guess a bit with the head space. I also started sterilising the jars in the water bath and let them boil in that, taking them out when required. In that way the volume of water was about right but you need tongs and gloves to do that job safely.

Then look at rows of applesauce. In this family we love it with roast pork and so I have 12 quart jars put by.

Spare lids and pectin used in some recipes are now on my wish list for Christmas from my sister in law. She buys them during the spring when canning season is over and gets a good deal on it. Easy and light to post and makes me very happy when it arrives during the holiday season.

Other ideas with apples, you can make a lovely apple and cinnamon pie filling. apple and blackberry jelly. For pie filling without pectin, I simply freeze the apple slices soaked in a bowl with lemon juice, blanch them for 2 mins and then pack them in 1 lb bags and freeze. Whatever portion size suits your family.

Some resources on canning :

www.homecanning.com
Noll's home canning ( with pictures)
Canning recipes
Canning recipes 1159 of them

Unbranding

The Pantry

Could you imagine what the products would look like in your life if it did not have the packaging around it, diverting your attention from the contents?

Here is my daughter's suggestion:

Idea for a downshifting challenge of the week: unbrand. Take labels off your branded goods (as long as you can still tell what they are!) and put things into containers (especially cereal) instead of using the boxes they come in. Does it change your perception? I tried this in my bathroom, with make-up and in the kitchen. It makes things much calmer not to have all the advertising all the time. Plus, some of the bottles and colours of the products in them are really pretty once the label's taken off.

Give your eyes a rest and discard the wrapping.....surprisingly it is what is in the box that matters.

Plum job

last year I canned some plums that were not quite ripe and the result was interestingly, unripe plums in sugar. Good for making tarts with but not that palatable. This year, we picked 25 lbs of plums at my friends house, red small plums and they have been preserved in a variety of ways :
bottled in 1 pint cans, with medium sugar syrup ( good to have with porridge in winter)
in 1 lb bags in the freezer ( they will need cooking overnight in Aga)
cut up in 1lb bags, and stoned, frozen for pie fillings.

25lbs of plums allow for 2 plum meals per week ( tart, porridge or stewed fruit).

Our own plum tree, which is a cooking variety Tsar will soon be providing a bumper crop too and will be turned into plum jam, plum jelly and plum chutney.

The thing about preserving is that you need to decide the quantity you are likely to consume, the quantity you can give away as gifts ( jams and jellies) and what amount can be given away or sold at the farmers market. There is no obligation to process all of it yourself. I plan 52 jars of jam and jelly per year ( 1 for each week).

If you are planning an orchard, look at succession of fruits so that you can eat them fresh without preservation. Plums are not guaranteed each year so its nice to have some stored away.

Looking forward to raspberries, apples and blackberries next.

80% reduction - Food strategy

Red Squirrel, Searching, Lancashire, UKDuring the nut season, squirrels can be seen scrurrying around finding and burying their nuts as a food supply for winter.Most of the food we eat today, is provided via one supermarket and travels miles to get to us and back again. My aim last year was to learn the skills of home canning and preserving and become like a squirrel. I made mistakes mainly on what to preserve and erred on the cautious side as to quantities. Recipe books are full of wonderful chutneys and jams and yet....you may not need as much as that to compile a larder of plenty.

The pocket book of homecanning was produced during wartime in 1943 and it makes fascinating reading about why and how to can. There is devision today as to the need and the safety of home canning but if you do home canning carefully observing hygiene and canning times, as well as eating it within the shelf-lifespan, it is a delightful way to store local food. I will get back to that subject over the next couple of days.

First, as part of the 80% reduction promise I want to look at what the task is that lies ahead to achieve that and then break it down into segments to look at individually.


under the 80% reduction on food, I have committed to the following :

1. growing and preserving local food. ( local = within 100 miles), grassfed and organic.This should be 70% of the diet.
2. Dry bulk goods transported from longer distances. That is, *whole, unprocessed* beans, grains, and small light things like tea, coffee, spices (fair trade and sustainably grown *ONLY*), or locally produced animal products partly raised on unprocessed but non-local grains, and locally produced wet products like oils. This is hard to calculate, because we spend very little on these things (except coffee) and whole grains don’t constitute a large portion of the diet. These are comparatively low carbon to transport and produce. Purchased in bulk, with minimal packaging (beans in 50lb paper sacks, pasta in bulk, tea loose, by the pound, rather than in little bags), this would also include things like recycled toilet paper, purchased garden seeds and other light, dry items. This should be no more than 25% of your total purchases.
3. Wet goods - conventionally grown meat, fruits, vegetables, juices, oils, milk etc… transported long distances, and processed foods like chips, soda, potatoes. Also regular shampoo, dish soap, etc… And that no one should buy more than 5% of their food in this form. Right now, the above makes up more than 50% of everyone’s diet.

Thus, if you purchase 20 food items in a week, you’d use 14 home or locally produced items, 5 bulk dry items, and only 1 processed or out of season thing.


The above list looks daunting but here are some ways to work towards achieving the aim:
1. Go shopping as you would normally
2. look at what you have bought in terms of size, value and packaging.
3. Divide into food groups as above and look at the percentages.
4. Create a menu over a period of one year to see what you actually eat ( I have written about this before). When you have an idea of what you actually eat you can plan the ingredients you need and how to purchase them in bulk. I gave an example of a loaf of bread per day which will require 500g of flour, therefore, you would need about 160kg per year devided into 25kg bags, you would need to purchase about 7 x 25kg bags per year. You could bulk buy these every 3 months?
5. In order to store food you have to make room. You will need to declutter some space in your house to do so and rotate the foods that you buy.
6. The menu should provide you with favourite meals that can be cooked in bulk and preserved. For instance, we eat a lot of pasta bolognaise, well at least every month once, as well as chili con carne, another favourite. I know that I could cook 12 quart jars full of each and have one convenience meal sorted for the rest of the year. I can do this whilst buying local meat in bulk, reducing not only mileage but packaging. I have made an investment in jars and bottling equipment but that is a one off. Even if the electricity fails, in principle the larder should be full of food that is easily prepared with minimum effort in for example a solar oven in future.
7. Grow a garden. Our plan has been this year to grow one salad and one green vegetable per day. Glut can be preserved to make up for the ones that do not grow and as a last resort....you can go to the farmers market and buy what failed. Carrots and potatoes are stored in the ground until I need them, not in the supermarket, cleaned and packaged.
8. It is not feasible to bulkbuy from the wholesaler until you have a picture of exactly the quantities your family requires over a year. When you have that information, you can then plan the shopping list every 3 or 4 months for your bulk supplies ( toiletpaper, flour, rice, tea, cleaning materials etc). The order amount from the wholesaler may seem high but you are cutting out the supermarket profits and it will be delivered to your door.
9. Take one step at a time.
10. Relax and learn new skills.

Food factory

There is not much food preserving in the summer - until the soft fruits come along. There has always been a good harvest of blackcurrant, and consequent jam boiling, and a harvest of gooseberries with consequent bottling as well as jam boiling. With the ever eager Aga at hand this is not a laborious job.
John Seymour, The fat of the land ( 1963:107)

A few sunny days and with small people to help we went over to a friends' garden to pick blackcurrants and plums. The plums were dripping from the trees and some of those will be canned tomorrow. Today blackcurrants have been turned into blackcurrant cordial and blackcurrant jelly for delicious spreads later in the year. Blackcurrants are high in vitamin C I believe, so a good spread to have in winter. the colour is splendid and gets everywhere. Our own bush gave us about 1 lb of fruit but with the 5lbs picked yesterday we have managed to get a sizeable larder contribution. I will be sharing it with my friend as her Dh is in hospital and unable to gather and preserve. It pays to help your friends and neighbours......

Food Storage - 3

Kitchen -cupboard

Why preserve? You could just simply eat what is in season, or you could just pop into the shop. Why would you ever want to preserve your food.

If we look back into history, food meant wealth. You could also not guarantee that the harvest from one year to the next would be a reality and a success. Preserving some food and some seeds could indeed stave off starvation if the weather prevented cultivation. Many civilisations moved across one end of the land to the other and preserves were their only way of keeping them alive apart from hunting and gathering.

Preserving enables you to take control of what is in your food, what you have grown and create a delicious banquet of food for your family to enjoy over the next year. The other is taste, a simply smoked kipper may not be smoked to your liking and you might like your lime pickle hotter than mine. Preserving enables you to find out what makes your tastebuds sing and gives you the satisfaction that you can make food that reflects your tastes and not simply the taste of the supermarket buyer.

You can preserve a whole host of international things that are simply not available in the shops. And amongst other things, preserving is fun, messy at times, scientific and very worthwhile when the shelves are lined with food that you have grown, picked and preserved.

How can you preserve food ?

Drying - fish and pasta are examples, as well as fruits, sun dried tomatoes, figs, cranberries, fruit leathers.
Salting - bacon, beef, anchovies, salt pork, gravadlax, sweet cured ham.
Smoking - kippers, salmon, beef, goose mackerel
making sausages -
Pickling - peppers, onions, ketchup, lemons,ghurkins, herrings, onions, cucumber, relish
Infused oils and vinegars - for marinades, on salads...tapenade, chilli oil. garlic oil. raspberry vinegar
Fermenting - sauerkraut,kimchee, miso,
Sugar - almond clusters, candied orange peel, crystalised violets,pumpkin and maple spread, jellies and jams, mint jelly, marmalade
alcohol - sloe gin, flavoured fruits of the forest in rum, oranges in brandy,
bottling and canning - tomatoe passata, peaches, plums, reday meals.
Freezing - fruits and vegetables.

So where shall we start....in season or per category?

Most familiar are jams and jellies on which I have touched before. Freezing is an easy preserving method but it requires a freezer and electricity and it all depends how you feel about that.

All in all, the delicacies that cost the earth are those that have been preserved with spices and oils, something different to flavour your food with and are an excellent talking point when you give gifts away at holiday times.

Inspired?

Food Storage - 2

Good Housekeeping, October 1925

Over the last week hopefully you will have created a list of menu items that your family use on a regular basis.

The next step is to apply maths........

On a sheet of paper, you need to look at each menu suggestion and break it down into the ingredients that you use :

Example : Spaghetti Bolognaise ( apparently the most popular and easy dish created in the UK!)

You will need :

Pasta 6 oz
minced beef 8 oz
onion 1
carrot 1
tomatoes 1 tin
binding agent 1 tbs of flour
tomatoe puree 1 tin
pepper and salt
cheese 4 oz


Continue to do that for every meal on your list and you will have a list of ingredients that your family use as a staple.
Look at your breakfast options and staple foods such as bread, milk, eggs etc.
This list is going to give you the most used ingredients on a monthly basis.
When completed you add up the amount of each ingredient.


Next comes the maths .......

Plan on preparing 80% of your meals from this storage planner. Other meals for the year and storage will include foods that you eat less, short term seasonal foods, special meals, holidays and basic storage items such as beans, rice, etc etc.

80% of 365 days is 292. Divide the total number of dishes or meals in step 1 into 292. So if you have 10 meals the factor is 0.0324
Multiply each food totalled on your list by the answer above. This will give you the amount of food that is needed for 80 to 90% of a years supply of foods most eaten.


Other items are easier to calculate:

If you use 1 loaf of bread per day and it takes 500g of flour, you will need 182.5 kg of flour in the year.
If the flour comes in 3 kg bags, that means that over the year you will need 60.83 bags of flour ( lets make that 61).
Now the average shelf life of flour that I buy is 3 months, so the quantity I need to 3 months = 20.33 kg
My supplier charges carriage per 27kg so I know on average that one order every 3 months will satisfy my requirement for 1 loaf of bread per day.

Knowing that I need 61kg of flour per year with the time I can store it, enables me to search out special offers. So if for instance my local supermarket does a special offer on flour, I would check the use by date......lets say it is 3 months ahead...I know that the maximum I should buy of that is 21kg.

You probably have a headache by now, but the principle is simple and if you have worked out what fruit and vegetables you consume on average over the year, it will help you put together a list of plants that you can grow yourself.

On my list for example is blackberry and apple pie, at least each month. Over the year I will make 12 of these. If I use 8 oz of each fruit for that, I know that I will need to freeze or can at least that amount of fruit to have blackberry and apple pie on the menu each month. Why store more? It should curbe enthousiasm for 26 kg of apples that I am not going to use.

Another one is that this family quite likes apple sauce, so the question is will I freeze the apples or prepare and can the apple sauce and in which quantity?

Next we will look at how to store items,. how to keep track and explore a variety of ways to preserve food.

Food Storage : Why and step 1

Canning Day

Having touched on the subject and had a few comments, I propose to do a series of small steps towards creating a food storage plan.

I do not intend to tell you what to store, that will be for you to work out, but what I can offer you is some ways of thinking about food storage, the reasons why it makes sense in today's society and a variety of practical ways to store food.

Why store? The world we live in today is fast moving, ever changing and full of surprises. On top of this, there has never been a time when the average family has had less food in their homes than now. A hundred years ago, people generally didn’t go to the store very often. As a rule, families were much more agrarian than today, with people growing the majority of the plants and animals they ate. Today, many of us would be at our rope’s end after just a couple of days of not being able to go to the grocery store. Listed below are some of the things that can happen to break up a normal family’s food supply channels:

• Loss of employment
• Strikes
• Fire
• Floods
• Droughts
• Hurricanes
• Wind Storms
• Earthquakes
• Civil unrest

It’s a good guess that every family will have at least one serious crisis during their life time. During such times, a family shouldn’t have to worry about what they are going to eat.

STEP 1
a. Create a list of 10 to 20 meals.
b. Create a separate list for breakfast and lunch foods, as appropriate and if desired.
c. As you begin this process you may not think of many foods. Post this list in a prominent place in your kitchen for the coming 2 weeks. Each time you think of a new food write it on the list. Ask the family for ideas and suggestions. Make the list reflect what your family typically eats and enjoys.

It will be different for each family, but in order to store the foods we are most likely eating we need to do some research.

In the meantime, whatever you store, the main thing we need to stay alive is water. Go check the availability of water in your home, check how you can save water and what you need to make water safe for consumption if it was not available.

On your shopping list this week, purchase 1 bottle of water for each member of your family.
For a family of 5 and 1 dog I have calculated the amount to be 40 litres in the house. That would be for 1 week if there was no water at all. Watre in the stores comes with its own sell by date, so check what the length of storage is and then find a place to put it in your home that is accessible. Rotate.