- All right, welcome, everybody,
to Easy Food Preserving, Canning Free.
I'm happy you're here.
I wasn't sure how food preserving was going to go over,
so I'm happy to see that we have a full room.
It's a topic that I like to talk a lot about.
So first, I just like to introduce myself a little bit,
how I became a gardener.
A lot of people assume that I grew up on a farm
because I teach gardening,
but I really grew up in the opposite of a farm,
which is a row home in Philadelphia.
We didn't have a yard.
I didn't know anyone that had a garden.
We actually didn't eat vegetables growing up,
so I never actually thought about how vegetables are grown.
So a few years ago, I emailed my mom and said,
"Can you send me a picture
"of me in a garden when I was little?"
because we actually did have a yard for a few years.
This is what she found, me with an azalea bush.
That's about the extent of it.
But she sent me this great note.
"Here are the only photos I have
"where you're even near a plant.
"Apparently, after your sixth birthday,
"we never let you near another flower or garden.
"I can only plead that we are city folks
"and always have been.
"We have plenty of photos of you on concrete.
[audience laughs]
"Love, Mama, Queen of the Concrete Jungle." [laughs]
So that's a real note,
and I thought I had to put that in my workshop.
It's so great.
So then when I was 26, I was living in San Francisco,
another big city, and for some reason I started to think,
"I want to learn how to grow food,"
and I just say it must be because I lived in California
and weird things happen to your brain
when you live in California, and so I ended up moving
to a town of 100 people in northeast Missouri.
Very rural.
Very much a shock to my system.
And I ending up shacking up
in this little 90 square foot cabin slash shack
with my now husband.
And then that was when
I really fell in love with gardening that year.
And you can see the shack is in the back,
and that was our first garden we ever created.
We were very artistic. We created a circular garden.
There's a few things I wouldn't do again in that garden,
but we won't talk about that today.
And then I moved to Madison and I was hired to develop
one of the kids' gardening programs
at Troy Gardens if you're from Madison,
and then I also created a youth farm program
that's also in Madison.
And then a few years ago,
my husband and I sold our last house
and then bought our current house,
and it was totally overgrown.
You couldn't see it from the street.
So first thing we did was clear out
a lot of the overgrown shrubs.
That was where a lot of the sun is.
And then this is the next weekend.
[audience laughs]
Just kidding.
If I knew how to do that, that would be a really good class.
A one-week garden.
No, this is two years later.
[laughs] It was a process.
And then that's another shot.
So I live on a pretty busy corner
of walkers and bikers and some cars.
So the garden is in the front,
and then it wraps around the back,
or around the side, really, because there's more sun there.
So we cut down those two small trees
and then put a vegetable garden along the side, as well.
So the theme, I think,
that runs through that introduction is community.
And I love gardening and the gardening community,
and I like to teach and I like to learn in community.
So I would love to invite you to join my community.
I'm trying to make a gardening community
that's free of geographic limitations.
So I have a free Facebook group
with gardeners from all over the world.
We're actually having a planning party right now.
And then I have an email list
which the wonderful volunteers are going to pass around.
You're welcome to sign up for it.
I send out an email once a week with a timely gardening topic.
And then my business is The Creative Vegetable Gardener.
So I educate and inspire people
to get more from their vegetable gardens,
so more food, more beauty, more joy.
Whatever you want more of,
I want to support you in getting that.
And I like simple and elegant solutions,
so that's what we're going to talk about today with food preserving.
I always try the most simple thing first,
and if that doesn't work, I try the next complicated thing.
And then I like to learn and teach in community,
because I think when you learn about gardening in community
like all of us together here,
you make less mistakes and you have more fun.
So hopefully we'll have some time to share some of our--
I can't imagine how much knowledge is in this room,
how much gardening experience.
It's probably thousands of years.
And then I didn't bring handouts
because I speak to hundreds of people this weekend,
but if you sign up for my email list,
I'll email you the handout
in case you want to refresh your memory.
Okay.
So why might you want your garden to feed you all year?
And we can actually back up to this one.
So how many months of the year
do you eat food from your garden?
So I, today, was eating a soup that I brought
that I looked in my thermos and I thought,
"Oh, I'm eating a whole bunch of things from my garden."
How many people this week ate something from your garden?
All right, so some people are doing a great job.
There's no reason why you can't be eating from your garden,
"food from your garden," not necessarily
directly out of my garden this time of year,
but food from my garden all year round.
That's my goal.
So why might you want to do that?
Well, you save money.
So if you go food shopping this time of year,
things are at their highest prices
because they're coming from very far away.
So when you put away some of your own food,
you can save money.
A few years ago, we'll talk about this later--
But I store butternut squash in my basement,
and one day, I went food shopping at the grocery store
and I saw a butternut squash that was a similar size
to one I had in the basement, so I thought,
"I wonder how much this is."
So I put it on the scale, and it was 12 bucks.
[audience laughs]
It was probably February, and I thought,
the one I have in my basement was probably
a dollar, two dollars, in September.
I actually didn't grow it.
I just bought it from the farmers' market,
and I thought, "Yeah! Look how much money I saved,"
because I had like 10 butternut squashes down there.
So it's a great way to save money.
Blueberries is another way.
They're very expensive this time of year.
I eat a lot of smoothies, and I just used
blueberries that I picked in the summer and froze
in my smoothie this morning.
So a great way to save money.
Higher quality.
I think we all know this as gardeners
that sometimes the things we get at the grocery store
don't taste as good as the things
that we get out of our garden.
And I think frozen, I cook down and freeze
a lot of tomatoes, which we're going to talk about later,
and I think that's a really good example,
because when I buy canned tomatoes from the grocery store
versus my own tomatoes that I froze,
my own tomatoes taste so much better.
They're so sweet and so flavorful.
So we can have some of that high quality
that lasts longer throughout the year.
And then you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor longer.
Gardening is a lot of work.
It's a lot of joyful work, for sure,
but it's still hours and time and money invested.
And so a day like today in February
when I'm still eating food out of my garden,
I really feel like I'm getting my money's worth,
the most for my labor and my time and my money
because I'm continuing to eat from my garden all year round.
So... [laughs]
So this is not really true,
but I like to say that, why I hate canning.
So how many people have spent a day in the kitchen canning?
It's maybe 85 degrees.
You're canning whatever, tomatoes,
and at the end of the day, you feel so relaxed
and so wonderful that you're dancing with your partner...
[audience laughs]
to music or whatever because you just accomplished
a day of canning?
Anybody feel like that at the end of the day canning?
So, yes, usually at the end of the day of canning
at our house, my hair is all crazy sticking up
and my husband and I are both sweating
and the kitchen looks like it exploded
and we have tons of cleanup
and we have like 18 jars that we canned, which is okay.
So, when I lived on that farm,
that's how I learned how to food preserve, was canning.
And then we moved to Madison
and I realized I don't really like canning that much.
And it's fine if you're somebody that does.
If you enjoy it, I think you should do it.
But if you don't like it, if you're like me,
I started to realize there has to be easier ways
to put away food.
I shouldn't have to can everything.
So we do can salsa.
That's the only thing we can every year.
And no, we don't look like that
at the end of a canning day.
We might be arguing by that time.
[laughs]
So some of the things we're going to talk about today
is from my book, Super Easy Food Preserving.
So after the years of talking to people about preserving,
I would say, "Did you know that you could freeze kale raw?"
or, "Did you know you could do this?" and people would say,
"No, I didn't know that." And I started to think, "Okay.
"It would be fun to just get all this information in one spot."
So I did write a book, and so some of the things we're going to talk about,
you'll see there are some pages from the book,
so just so you know what we're looking at.
So the first thing that sounds pretty obvious
is preserve what you eat.
I have become victim to this in the past.
Cauliflower. Why did I freeze cauliflower?
I have no idea, and then two years later,
I find it at the bottom of the freezer, and I think,
"Yeah, I don't think we eat frozen cauliflower,"
or, "We don't eat," chard, I think,
is another thing I've frozen that we never eat.
And so you want to preserve something that
everything that you preserve you really want to make sure
you're going to go through.
So I do have these questions,
and maybe we'll come back to these at the end.
This is one of the things where I have people
think about it and talk amongst yourselves.
But some questions to think about
when you're getting ready for preserving season,
which usually isn't until summer, what produce do you spend
the most money on throughout the year?
Which vegetables taste better when you eat them in season?
Which vegetables would you eat more of
if you had better, more access to them throughout the year?
So I know for my sister, she was talking about
this time of year there are certain things
she just doesn't buy at the grocery store
because it's too expensive.
So then maybe there are some things
that you could put away that it wouldn't matter
what price they are this time of year.
And then, what vegetables are easy to preserve
for out of season eating?
So, what vegetables are in that list for you
and then are also easy to preserve?
So I also take this strategic view for gardening, as well.
So you're thinking more strategically.
What do I eat?
What do I buy from the grocery store?
What dishes do I cook on a regular basis?
You can deconstruct some of those.
So for us, we eat a lot of beans and rice
is kind of an easy go to if we don't have another plan for dinner,
and so we put away garlic and onions,
two of those ingredients,
freeze peppers, freeze corn, make salsa,
so that we have a lot of those ingredients on hand
and they're from our own garden.
So you could do that with your own menu
that you eat often at home.
Maybe it's pasta and red sauce or garlic bread or pesto.
Deconstruct some of those dishes and see,
can you grow some of those things in your own garden
and then preserve them so that you don't have to buy them
from the grocery store?
So, a few years ago, I was at the farmers' market,
and I'm a big gardener,
but I still go to the farmers' market and buy things,
and I would buy things maybe that I didn't grow,
like blueberries or strawberries or cantaloupe.
And then one time I thought,
"Why don't I buy things for preserving?"
And then all of a sudden I thought, "That's a great idea!"
So actually, over the years,
I now grow less tomatoes in my garden
and I just go to the farmers' market
during the height of tomato season
and buy tomatoes for a dollar a pound
and supplement what I already have.
But you don't have to grow everything you preserve.
And I've had a lot of people who have emailed me
or come up to me after class and say,
"It sounds so common sense, but when you said it,
"it was like this big light bulb that I thought, 'Oh, yeah.'
"I just used to look at my garden
"and what a preserve is the things
"that come out of my garden."
And that's very much not the case for me.
When you saw those buckets of blueberries,
they weren't from my yard.
I go to a blueberry farm and pick,
I pick 25 pounds of blueberries, freeze them,
and then just use them all year round.
So I felt like that let me off the hook,
and so there are some things now that I preserve
that don't come from my own garden.
And you can go to a U-pick farm
and you can go to the farmers' market,
and when it's during the height of the season
of certain vegetables, they're so inexpensive,
so you can get some really good deals.
Sometimes it's cheaper to buy them
than to grow them yourself.
So blueberries are an example of that.
I tried to calculate
how many pounds of blueberries I eat a year,
because I put them in my smoothies every morning,
and I think I calculated 37 pounds, I think.
[laughs]
And I still have not been able to pick 37 pounds
in one picking.
But last year, my friend came
and she picked some for herself and some for me,
so I had 25, and I still have some left over.
I still have a few bags left.
So I thought, "Well, I'll write down to see,
"when do I run out?"
I think I'll run out probably by April.
I'll have to wait until July.
So you can also do that, try to calculate how much.
It's kind of fun to figure out how much you use of something
so you can grow it or buy it
so that you only use your own all year.
And then butternut squash is another one where I realized
it takes up a lot of room.
It's quite a time investment, 110, 120 days.
Big, sprawling vine.
I don't know that I want to give up the room
for butternut squash.
Sometimes you only get three, five, six off of the vine,
and so I decided I'm not going to grow it anymore.
I'm just going to go to the farmers' market in October,
and butternut squash is a dollar, two dollars each.
And I just fill up a whole bunch of crates and store them,
and we'll talk a little bit more later how,
and then eat them all winter.
We still have some in the basement right now.
So that's probably less than 10,
maybe 10 dollars' worth of squash.
So, once you think about those questions
that were on that previous slide,
we're thinking a little bit more strategically and deciding.
I recommend starting with three to five priorities
for food preserving.
And then if you accomplish those things,
then you can keep going.
But what are the things that you really want to have,
the things that you're really going to eat a lot of?
In our house, it's garlic, onions, tomatoes, peppers,
and probably pesto would be my top five.
So those are the things I direct a lot of my energy towards,
and then there's some other things
that we preserve, as well.
And then I also devote a big part of my garden
to those things, because we eat a lot of them,
I preserve a lot of them, so I'm going to grow a lot of them.
So, today we're going to talk about
three easiest ways to preserve food...
Preserving it or really storing it fresh,
which would be the easiest.
It is my first choice.
Then in the fridge, and then in the freezer.
So no stoves.
Well, maybe a little stove involved, but not too much.
So fresh is vegetables kept in their natural state
in a cool, dry place in your house.
So maybe a basement or a semi-warm garage
or a cold room or a closet, somewhere that doesn't freeze.
So for me, it's my basement.
And this is actually my old basement,
which was pretty warm because it was in a new house.
It was unfinished and we didn't hang out there a lot,
but it was still in the 50s often,
maybe the 60s in the winter.
But I still was able to store quite a bit.
I don't have a root cellar.
I don't really do anything fancy.
I use these crates.
They're actually bulb crates from Jung's.
You can go get them, and I think Felly's you can get them from, as well.
They're only a few dollars.
You can buy a bunch of these crates.
They stack really well.
So on the right, we have the onions that we store.
So I grow a lot of storage onions,
somewhere between three and five hundred onions.
And then on the left are two just waxed boxes
I got from the grocery store, filled with garlic.
So I usually grow about 220 garlic
so we can use our own garlic throughout the year.
Both of those, I grow storage varieties,
so that's one thing you want to keep in mind
that if you're looking for things
that you want to preserve or store,
you want to try to go storage varieties.
So winter squash, back to that picture.
Like I said, I don't grow it. That was my light bulb moment.
I just go and buy it.
I usually buy somewhere between 12 and 15.
Usually by the end of the 12 or 15, I think,
"I really don't want to eat butternut squash anymore."
So we have enough that we get sick of it,
so that's success, I would guess.
And then sometimes we buy a couple acorn squash.
They don't store as well, so we eat them first.
And then there's so many different kinds of squash,
and there are some that are specifically for storage.
So butternut is not the only one that you can store,
but you just want to look for ones,
and if you're growing them in your own garden,
look for some ones that say, "Good for storage,"
if you think you want to try to keep them over the winter.
So I just put them in those crates,
and I just stack the crates.
Now I have a little room in my basement
that kind of looks like it would be a root cellar.
It's not, but it's just a closet and it has no windows
and it has some shelves.
So I just lay them out in a single layer in those crates,
and then I just stack the crates and then put 'em in that closet
so they don't have any light and it stays pretty cool.
So, some other things that you can do fresh
are garlic and onions, we already talked about.
Potatoes you can store. Sweet potatoes.
I actually have sweet potatoes. I grew sweet potatoes
for the first time in a long time last year,
and I have a few crates of sweet potatoes, as well.
We're still eating them.
They like to be a little warmer,
so I actually have them in my linen closet upstairs
because they don't really like to be that cold.
They like to be on the warmer side.
And then regular potatoes.
And then spinach is a little bit of a cheat,
because you can keep it fresh in your garden.
Has anyone ever overwintered spinach?
A few people.
So it'll survive all winter in Wisconsin.
It's one of my favorite things to grow
in my own garden is spinach,
and it'll start growing again in March,
and you can continue to harvest it.
So I plant it in August,
harvest it all the way up through Thanksgiving,
sometimes even to Christmas.
Goes dormant right around Christmas to mid to end February,
and then will start re-growing, so it's kind of a cheat.
You can store it fresh, and it's so fresh
that you can just store it in your garden.
And it survives fine. No cover.
I don't have a greenhouse, anything like that.
It's just out in the garden. And then there's a few herbs.
Most herbs are best dried,
so that's kind of fresh slash dried.
Very minimal processing needed to dry herbs.
So fridge is vegetables that can be kept
for a long period of time with the aid of refrigeration.
Pretty straightforward.
So one of my favorite things to store are carrots.
I usually plant a fall...
I should've put that picture in.
Well, I might have that. Let's see.
I usually plant a fall crop of carrots
sometime in July or August,
and then I keep them in my garden all fall,
periodically harvest them.
This year, I harvested--
In one of my other presentations, I have the picture.
I went out on December 6th, this past December 6th,
and it had already snowed.
I went out with my fork and a couple of those crates
and I harvested a whole bed of carrots.
And I always think my neighbors probably drive by and think,
"What is she doing?
"She's gardening in the snow? [laughs]
"This lady is a little off."
But as long as the ground doesn't freeze,
you can store those carrots in your garden.
But I was suspecting that the ground was going to freeze soon,
and they'll turn to mush if you keep them too long.
So I dug them out of the garden, put them in those crates.
I broke off all the carrot tops,
and then I left the soil on.
It was pretty wet, so my husband,
I think who's in this room,
I'll give him a little bit of credit, he said,
"You might want to spread those out to dry."
So they were pretty wet. The soil was wet.
So I actually took them down to the basement,
put them on some newspaper just overnight,
let them dry out a little bit,
and then I packed them into plastic bags with the dirt on.
So what happens sometimes, a lot of vegetables
have a waxy cuticle that protects them,
and when we start scrubbing and cleaning,
you're disturbing that cuticle.
So I just leave the soil on, and they just hang out there,
and then we just take out a whole bunch at a time
and clean them and then use them for a few weeks
and then take out a whole other batch.
So I actually took this picture about two weeks ago,
and I grow purple and yellow and orange.
And that's what it looks like. It still looks good.
It's been a few months in the fridge.
Just put them in handle bags, and then I just shove them all
at the bottom back of my fridge.
So a lot of times when I teach this class,
people say, "How do you fit all that in your fridge?"
And my question to you all is, "What do you have in your fridge
"that you can't fit all these things?"
I don't know. I have room.
That's basically all we have in our fridge is vegetables mostly.
So I do have room in my fridge. I don't have two fridges.
And you can do the same exact thing with beets.
So, I usually have a whole bunch of bags.
I probably had three or four bags full of carrots,
and then I grow less beets,
so I had about a bag that big of beets.
We're almost through the beets.
But they'll last quite a long time,
and actually, last summer,
I found a couple beets just floating around the fridge
in July from the previous fall, and they were fine.
I mean, maybe they got a little tough.
I don't know, I actually just threw them in the compost
because we had fresh beets from the garden,
but I thought, "Wow, this is like nine months later
"and they're still just hanging out in the fridge."
And so I like this because it's minimal processing.
I don't have to can beets.
I don't have to pickle beets.
I actually prefer my vegetables fresh as much as possible.
So we eat most of the carrots fresh.
Sometimes we put them in soups,
and then the beets we tend to roast and cook,
but sometimes we grate them and eat them raw.
And actually, these carrots are really good,
I think because I left them in the garden so long
and so they got sweet with all the cold,
but way better than most carrots are going to get
from the grocery store.
So for the fridge, it's a smaller category,
but beets and carrots will last a long time.
Leeks will last some time,
but they tend to go bad after a while.
Cabbage will last a really long time,
not quite as long as beets and carrots.
And then cucumber is another cheat
where you can either make refrigerator pickles
last for a long time.
This year, I fermented, made fermented pickles,
and supposedly, they last for two years in the fridge.
And they're really good.
They're really crispy
and they have a really nice sour taste.
So if you haven't done any fermenting
and you like sour pickles, try it this year,
because it's really easy, minimal processing,
and they last for a really long time
and they're really crispy.
And then cabbage is something.
For me, I don't always grow cabbage
because it takes up a lot of room,
and you can buy a cabbage at the farmers' market
for a dollar, and so sometimes I think,
"Okay, I have to buy the seed, start the seed,
"plant it in the garden, it's going to take 65 days,
"and I could buy one for a dollar.
"I think I'll just buy cabbage."
So sometimes I'll buy a bunch
at one of the last farmers' markets
and just put them in my fridge
and let them sit there for a few months until we use them.
So freezer, vegetables that are a pre-processed
and kept in a chest freezer.
So, pre-processed.
Some things you can freeze raw
and some things benefit from a little bit of cooking
before you freeze them.
One of the things that's really easy,
and I think a lot of people tend to can tomatoes,
and that's great if you like to do that,
but you don't need to.
So what I do with tomatoes,
they're one of the easiest things to freeze.
I just chop them up.
So I know that--
How many people take your skins off
and your seeds out of your tomatoes?
Anybody? A few people.
Yeah, so I decided I'm just going to get used to
the skins and the seeds.
I think what happens is all the grocery store sauce
is just velvety smooth, because they take off all the skins
and they take out all the seeds,
and so they've trained us to think
like that's what sauce is supposed to be like.
So I decided that's way too much work,
and I'm just going to eat the seeds and the skins.
And so now I do and we don't even really notice them.
Once in a while you get
a little piece of skin in your teeth, but whatever.
It's not that big of a deal.
So what I do is I just harvest my tomatoes.
If they're paste tomatoes or if they're not paste tomatoes,
slicers, I don't really care.
I don't care what color they are.
I'll just cut them all up, just chop them pretty roughly,
and then I picked this tip up from some of my old coworkers,
and then I spread it out
in a big stainless steel casserole pan and I put it--
Do I have? No, I don't have a picture.
Then I put it across two burners on my stove,
and so it's cooking down a lot faster.
And the reason why...
So you can freeze tomatoes raw,
but tomatoes have so much water in them
that you're freezing all of that water,
and if you've ever frozen tomatoes whole
and then you defrost them,
you end up with like nothing pretty much.
It's just a bowl of water with some skins and seeds.
And so I decided, it's a little bit more work,
not the most simple, but I like to cook off
as much of that water as possible
because then those tomatoes are ready to use.
So I just cook it down on low for, I don't know,
an hour and a half or two hours in the evening at my house
until it looks more like sauce.
And then I put them in yogurt containers.
I just save yogurt containers throughout the year,
pack them in yogurt containers.
And the way I use them is pretty much for anything.
If there's any recipe that says whole canned tomatoes,
chopped canned tomatoes, anything canned tomatoes,
I just defrost one of those and just throw it in.
I realize it doesn't really matter if it's whole tomatoes,
chopped, diced, whatever.
It's all the same. I never noticed a difference.
So we use it for that.
So I haven't bought canned tomatoes in years.
And then you can also use it for sauce.
If you like it for sauce, we just did this the other night.
We just used some garlic and onions from our basement,
saut? those up, dump one or two of those yogurt containers
in the pan, add some salt and pepper and maybe some oregano,
and then you have tomato sauce with seeds and skins.
But you can train yourself not to even notice.
Put a lot of other things in the pasta,
and then you'll never know.
And so I think this is a good one
where if you wanted to set the goal
that you never bought another tomato product again,
it's definitely possible.
I haven't bought a tomato product in years
because I always have these yogurt containers of--
They're not even really sauce, tomatoes.
Tomato sludge.
[audience laughs]
So, freezer, and we can talk a little bit.
Maybe I'll highlight one or two more of these,
but all fruits can be frozen.
Basil, I often make a lot of mine into pesto.
Beans you can freeze.
Some places will say you should do
a little steaming or blanching of beans.
I've also done them raw and they're fine.
Broccoli is one thing that I really put a lot away, as well.
It would also be on my priority list.
I do do a little processing
where I just steam it very, very lightly.
So with some of these things that need some pre-processing,
the tip is not to overcook them before you freeze them.
So I was just talking to a friend and she said,
"Oh, I put away all this broccoli,
"but it's so mushy my family won't eat it."
And we have had that experience
when we have overcooked it before freezing.
So now I just steam it right until it gets bright green,
and then put it in ice water to stop the cooking
and then dry it off and put it in freezer bags.
And I just ate some in a soup today,
and you would never know that it was frozen.
It still has a little bit of crunch.
Not crunch, but you know. It's not mushy, let's say.
And it even got cooked in a soup.
So that's one thing to be careful.
If you're steaming or blanching things,
just really quickly so you're not overcooking.
Celery, easy to freeze.
Chard you can do raw.
Cilantro.
Sometimes I make it into different sauces,
but I've also done it raw.
Collards, corn.
I don't actually freeze a lot of eggplant.
I like it better fresh.
Garlic scapes I make into garlic scape pesto.
Kale is another one that I really freeze a lot of,
and I just freeze it raw.
I just rip up the leaves or cut up the leaves
and just shove as much as possible
into a little quart freezer bag.
And we actually were upset this week
because we realized we used it all already.
So we use it in soups
and we use it in different dishes that we like kale in.
I've heard of people just crumbling it,
once it's frozen, you can crumble it into little pieces
and put it in smoothies.
You can use it all different kinds of way.
Leeks you can also freeze.
Parsley you can freeze. I've done that.
Peas you can freeze.
We usually eat most of our peas fresh.
Peppers is another one that I really love to freeze.
You can just cut up peppers raw
and throw them in a freezer bag.
That's one thing that we use a lot of during the season.
Kind of like the butternut squash story,
one day a few years ago I went into Whole Foods
to pick up something, and I saw,
"Red pepper sale, $3.99 a pepper."
I was like, "Wow, that's kind of expensive."
And I thought, "I wonder how many peppers
"I have in my freezer."
I was like, "I think at least 200."
And I was like, "Oh my gosh, I have so much.
"I have hundreds of dollars' worth of peppers in my freezer."
So that's an example.
I think red peppers are really expensive,
certainly in the winter.
And of course, it's not like biting into a raw pepper,
but I think what happens in the winter,
we tend to cook things a lot more
than we might in the summer where we eat more raw food.
So if you're cooking a lot of your vegetables anyway,
it doesn't really matter if they've been frozen first.
If you really like raw peppers,
it's not going to be quite the same.
Summer squash.
Tomatoes we talked about, and then tomatillos.
Sometimes I'll cook down my tomatillos
like I do my tomatoes.
And then if you're going to freeze food,
it's a good idea to use a chest freezer.
You might've noticed in your--
Well, how many people in here have a chest freezer?
So a lot of people, yeah. So they're not that expensive.
And they don't take that much energy.
And they remain at a constant temperature.
So sometimes you might notice
if you have ice cream in your upstairs,
your kitchen freezer, fridge freezer,
you rich in and it's kind of defrosted and it's soft,
so it has a natural defrost cycle,
and so things are kind of defrosting and freezing again,
and over time, some of the quality degrades.
You can see if you leave ice cream in there for a long time
it gets crystallized.
So it's much better to have a chest freezer.
And so I store the majority of things in my chest freezer,
and then I just bring up one or two things periodically
up into the upstairs freezer,
and then we use it within a few weeks.
And you can see here, I think the next slide
is that I use all different kinds of containers.
I use old, I think that white one
was a huge peanut butter container,
and I put tomatoes in there.
I do use glass canning jars, but you have to be careful
because if you put something in
that's too liquidy it may break.
And there's people that say if you use head space
and you use the wide mouth they won't break,
but I have had a lot of broken jars.
So I'll put broccoli in there.
I'll put corn in there.
I'll put raspberries in there.
So I put dry things in there so they won't break.
And then I use little jam jars,
for pesto mostly or if I made pizza sauce.
And then I use a lot of plastic yogurt containers
or Tupperware or whatever you want to use.
And then I also use a lot of freezer bags.
So I try to get the freezer bag type,
not just a cheap Ziplock bag, I try to get the freezer bag.
But the thing I like about all of these things
is that you can use them over and over again.
I would say the plastic bags have the least amount of life
because they tend to get beat up,
so I do try to use containers as much as possible
because then I can just use them every year
instead of throwing away plastic bags.
So the goal of super easy food preserving
is to preserve only what you can eat each year.
So, my personal goal, which doesn't always happen,
is that by, I look at strawberry season.
When strawberries come on, I think,
"It's the beginning of food preserving season again."
And it starts slow, because I don't preserve a lot in the spring
or the early summer.
But by the time strawberry season comes along,
sometimes I go and pick strawberries, I think,
"I should be very much well through
"whatever is in the freezer.
"We shouldn't have much left."
Sometimes that works out better than others.
But it's a waste of time and energy and money
if you're putting away lots of things that just languish
at the bottom of your freezer for five years
and then you end up composting it.
I've been there and done that, but I'm trying to get better
and just preserve what we eat
and try to eat through it as much as possible
and always be turning over that freezer.
So the way that you can do this is by keeping records.
So I have gone through different ways that I keep records.
In my book, I have a couple record keeping sheets,
and then you can print them out from my website.
So now I have a little binder, which I didn't bring,
and then when I put something into storage,
I try to write it on the binder or on the sheet.
In the past, sometimes I would just
put a sheet on my freezer,
and every time I put something in the freezer, I would just mark it down.
Sometimes I realized by the time I got upstairs
I got distracted and then forgot to write it down.
But what has helped is that now I know
what is the ideal, at least for a few years,
of food to put away.
So I have kept track of how much pesto I put away each year.
And we don't really use more than 12 to 15 pestos.
We give some away. We use them throughout the year.
So even if I have basil still in my garden,
when I get to 15 pestos in the freezer, I just stop,
because it's just not worth it.
If we're not going to eat it, then it's not worth it.
And you can carry things over year to year,
but I've found that some of the quality
kind of degrades over time, so I try to eat everything
as quick as possible, really.
And then sometimes I just experiment with different things,
and so I'll write some notes.
But keeping really simple records
so that you're not putting away--
If you put away 30 bags of kale but you only eat 10,
you'll know that next year,
and so when I'm working on a vegetable, I'll say,
"How many did I put away last year?"
And sometimes my husband and I will check in
before food preserving season.
It's like, "What did we want more of?
"We wanted more kale."
I already know we want more kale, because we used it all.
It's like, "Well, how many did we put away?"
We put away 12. We ran out in February.
so maybe we should try to put away 20.
And so you have a formula.
I do the same thing with my garden.
So I have a base formula for food preserving,
and then I add different things each year.
Last year I made pizza sauce.
So you can change it up a little bit,
but you don't have to keep guessing every year.
You know what your base foundation is.
So, let's see.
Super Easy Food Preserving.
I do have lots of,
if you want to read more about specific things,
I have lots of food preserving posts on my blog
that you can, I think I have a category of food preserving.
A few people who are on my email list emailed me and said,
"Are you going to have your books with you?"
So I do have some books if you're interested.
And then the things that we talked about were,
preserve what you eat.
You don't have to grow everything you preserve.
That was a huge game changer for me.
We talked about fresh, fridge and freezer storage.
Eat all the food every year if possible.
And then keeping records.
So I'd invite you to just take a couple seconds
and in your own brain say,
"Okay, I'm going to try one or two things,
"maybe one thing that I learned today,
"and I'm going to commit to it."
You can add it to your long list
of all the things you thought about
from all the other classes and decide,
how are you going to do something different
in food preserving this year?
And then maybe we'll do this a little bit later
when we're done filming.
So this is my huge kale.
A few years ago, I have no idea why my kale got this tall,
but it was as tall as I am.
And this is in the fall, and my husband and I came home one day, and I said,
"You have to take a picture of me with this kale.
"I've never grown kale this big."
So I put it at the end of all my classes.
So thank you for coming and thinking about food preserving.
And I think this is a great time to think about food preserving,
because you can order food and order seeds
and decide that you're going to start some plants
with food preserving in mind.
So one of the classes that I taught last night,
one of the participants said,
"I actually reverse engineer my garden where I say,
"'What do I want to put away?'
"and then I make sure I'm going to grow all these things
"and makes sure I order the seeds and I start the plants."
So if you really like the idea of food preserving,
you can reverse engineer back to February
when it's time to buy seeds and it's time to start plants
and do those things with food preserving in mind.
So when you're looking through the seed catalogs,
look for varieties that are good for preserving.
So we'll end there, and then I'm happy to take questions
and we can talk about some more specifics if anybody would like to.
So thanks for coming.
[audience applauds]