Food… And I don’t care that it’s not Wednesday.
Food storage is picking up around here. I'm finding tricks to help us be more flexible in terms of time. For instance, I am through with blanching and peeling tomatoes. It was only this year that I found out it was entirely optional. Plus, those skins and seeds that people discard are good for you! No more sweaty slippery finger-pruning prep! I do have a tomato saucer, which takes out the skins and seeds anyway, but for just our home canned tomatoes/paste/salsa/sauce? It's just chop 'em up and throw 'em in a pot. So easy. Now, I also don't have hours to process tomatoes, so lately we've been letting them simmer down into paste. I'm just learning as I go here, and figuring out what works for us. Here are a few jars of finished paste from our tomatoes.
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A couple of days ago I had some friends over and we had a day of canning corn. It was good work! We worked most of the day, and at one point had 7 kids in our care! Needless to say, we ordered pizza that evening. Small price to pay for over 200 pints of corn!
My many laundry baskets (normally full of toys or just miscellaneous whatever…) came in very handy for holding cobs in their various forms throughout the day.
At first I was a little daunted by having to compost all these cobs and husks (they take a long time to decompose), but now I have an idea for them all! I'll revisit this in a later post…
Home canned corn is like nothing else! So delicious. Plus it's one more thing I don't have to worry about buying in a can and risking (further) exposure to BPAs. And we get to support local farmers! It's simple work, a good excuse to hang out with friends, and the look of all that home canned goodness on your shelves in the winter is just not something you can buy. 
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I had to harvest my potatoes early- they got some kind of blight and the foliage was all turning spotty yellow and brown (and not in the normal way at the end of the season). I'm pretty sure it's the same early blight that the tomatoes get every year around here. I feel like it's unavoidable in the city here, but my growing/rotation methods seem to ensure we get a good harvest. I may end up having to chop/partially cook/freeze the potatoes in the future… we'll see. Anyway, the return was not nearly what it was last year per square foot. We also harvested about a month early because of this blight, but still. I think next year we will return to doing the really vertical method like last year. I wonder if it would reduce the risk of blight, too.
Regardless, they are very tasty, and local potatoes aren't hard to come by.
Here's a recent breakfast that was just so local all I could do was smile. Eggs from our backyard, homegrown potatoes, tomatoes, squash and herbs. Toast from our local sourdough bakery, with pepper jelly (compliments of my friend's backyard). Homemade ketchup using paste made from our own tomatoes. The only non-local things were the salt and pepper, the cream cheese, and the fish sauce in the ketchup. Yeah! I'm getting better at this…
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Yay! You got livejournal working! Your food harvest looks amazing. Is this your own produce? Stuff your buying? At the job your doing?
Sorry I didn’t reply to this earlier! The corn is from a local farm. Everything else (potatoes, tomatoes, etc.) are from my garden. 🙂
All the food looks so delicious! 🙂
Have you ever frozen your corn instead of canning? When we get moved, we want to invest in a HUGE chest freezer and freeze as many things as possible. Our new house has a glass-top stove, and I’ve heard those tend to break under the weight and heat of canning, so until we can get an area set up with separate burner for canning, we’ll be pretty limited to freezing.
Freezing is great! We have a ceramic stove top and haven’t had any trouble! I don’t know how comparable it is to glass, but maybe you could try it? At the very least you should be able to put up high-acid/sugary stuff by canning in a hot water bath. 🙂
That all looks so good. It’s nice to see you back again 🙂
I love the whole process of preparing and storing food like that. My achievements have been a million times more modest than yours but this weekend I’ve used plums Zakary and I picked from the local fruit farm to make plum gin, plum jam and plum upside down cake and pickled some organic red cabbage that I got locally. It makes me happy to see I can do this stuff and hopeful that I can do it a lot more once we look at moving to a house with garden space for growing at the end of the year.
I am super curious to hear about the corn. We didn’t compost our cobs…because we’ve been told so many times that they’ll never break down (we’re just composting in barrels right now).
I froze half of our corn and canned half, as an experiment in taste. 😉
Just sitting down after doing peaches today…13 quarts plain, 13 pints of spiced, ice cream in the gadget and peaches with raw cream for dessert. And I have almost 1/2 a bushel to do tomorrow. Happy sigh.
Good idea on tomato paste. I have a food mill, and could run them through when using them out of the jars rather than peeling when processing, I suppose. I do like to have whole stewed tomatoes sometimes too, though. Hm…food for thought.
Ooh maybe you can try my cob experiment too… I’ll definitely post about it in the next week. Yeah, I heard they take at least a year to break down, and I’m not sure I want to mix them in with my compost!
Peaches! Lovely. Happy sighs all around. 🙂
omg I got so hungry reading this! I love how hard you work to have fresh wholesome food for your family.
Those potatoes are pretty too! 😀
Yum! Looks like you’ll be enjoying lots of delicious food in the winter months.