But, what to do with them? Some of my most depressing moments in the kitchen (and as hard as it is to believe, Aunt Toby has moments of domestic self-loathing just like everyone else) have been in the middle of an August or early September heat wave, with the sauce on the stove and the canner going as well, and sweat dripping down my face (anyone wanting to excuse themselves may do so now), the sink full of washed tomatoes and three humongous bowls of freshly picked tomatoes sitting out on the counter. This is usually accompanied by the sound of the DH’s voice gaily wafting from the garden, “Hey – we missed a lot out here; I’ll pick them so the slugs won’t get them!”

Yep. Those are moments when a shower at the Bates Motel has a certain charm.

However, a bit of creativity and outright avoidance will get us through.
First: Drying.
One of the best ideas we had several years ago was to get an electric food dehydrator. We use this for just about everything that can be cut up and then used later, whether it’s fruit, veggies, onions, you name it. We had a lovely appetizer in an Italian restaurant on our last trip to Edinburgh, Scotland (vs Edinburgh, PA), which consisted of little tomatoes which had been dried and preserved with garlic in olive oil, accompanied by thin slices of mozzarella cheese. This works especially well with tomatoes such as Princip Borgese, but being a totally classless American, I did it with cherry and grape tomatoes. Same great ‘summer in a bottle’ flavor.

Second: Freezing.
Don’t ask me where we got this technique, but we’ve been using it for fruit for years and it works for really any veggie also that is not too watery (for example, it will not work with things like zucchini – to freeze summer squashes such as these, grate them up, squeeze out the excess water, bag up and freeze for things like baked goods later). What we do for tomatoes is slightly different but the theory is the same: Cut up the fruit in question, lay out on cookie sheets, leaving space in between, and put in the freezer. When they are completely frozen, take off the cookie sheet (you might need to pry them off with a spatula), put into bags or other freezer containers and seal. If you are using ziplock(tm) bags, close almost all the way and suck out the air. The fruit will still stay in separate pieces.

For tomatoes, there is just one small additional thing to do: once you’ve cut them up in pieces (and with a big tomato, you should be cutting it up into 6-8 pieces; with a plum tomato, probably 4 pieces), use a spoon and get out as much of the “gishy” gelatinous stuff inside as you can. In freezing this will be very watery when you defrost. But freezing is a great way to keep tomatoes for when you want to do something later. Later in the fall, when it’s cooler, the garden is done and when you need tomatoes OR, you actually want to do a bit of canning or make sauce or whatever, you just pull out the bags, throw the tomatoes in a pot and off you go. You can cook up whatever you want and serve or cook it up and using the directions on your canner, can it up then.
A bit of summer when you least expect it.

What do you want to end up with?

This determines everything else. Opens the road or closes it. The first fork in the ‘decision tree’ (for the geeks out there).

Because strawberries are like – well, in their own fruity way, they are like potatoes: They can be baked, boiled, frozen, eaten fresh. All can be done to the same bucket of strawberries you pick, if you pick the right ones.

But if you ‘choose poorly’ (as the monk from that Indiana Jones movie put it), then your opportunities with the fruit become increasingly limited. And the reason for that (which will be outlined in much more detail in a later post but take my word for it now) is that, as Aunt Toby has said many times before about preserving food: It never gets any better than what it is the very first time you get it into your hands. Soft fruits (strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, cherries, etc.) can go from “mmmmm-yum” to “oh, yuck; look at that” in less than 24 hours.

Jam/Preserves (Canning): If what you want to make/preserve is jam/conserves/preserves, then if the strawberries you find in the field are what is referred to as ‘dead ripe’ (strong strawberry fragrance, perhaps have some soft spots), then you are in good shape. They will not travel well at all, but that is ok since you are going to get them home, rinse them really well, cut out anything dubious, hull them, throw them in the pot (like you see above) with sugar or a little less sugar and some pectin and boil the whole mess down until a sample does not flow down a saucer. Jam.

The rinsing and the cooking will do most of the job of preserving; the lid will get sucked down and if there is any mold, you will know it the minute you open up the jar later on. On the other hand, if you also have half-ripe or half-unripe(the ones with the green or white ‘shoulders’ at the top of the berries), those are really good to put into making jam – they have more pectin in them naturally and will help the jam firm up.

Frozen berries: Depending on what method you use for freezing, ‘dead ripe’ will work also, but only if you use the “plastic bag or container’ and anticipate just thawing the whole deal and putting it over ice cream or cake or something like that. Treat them the same way in that you rinse and rinse them, cut out anything dubious, hull, slice or just mush them up and freeze (a little sugar if you like that sort of thing). If what you want is a product that when you take it out of the freezer still actually LOOKS like a strawberry, then you need a younger strawberry – not ‘dead ripe’ – ripe, certainly, with a nice but not overwhelming fragrance, but still firm. These will travel well from the field to your kitchen and will hold long enough that you can go through several rinses, and use your method of freezing them. They will not be mushy, will hold their shape. In a later post, I will outline the method we use at Chez Siberia which produces individually frozen berries so that we put them into a ziplock(tm) bag and can use them any way we want them later on.

Fruit Leather (Drying): Any strawberries are good for this since the process requires you basically to make jam without sugar and then spread it on the plastic trays in a dehydrator unit.

Fresh: Save your best berries for eating fresh. And ‘best’ does NOT mean ‘dead ripe’ because no one walks straight in from picking them and pulls out a pound cake, washes up berries to put on the cake, cover with whatever you cover your berries with in terms of your version of ‘cake and berries’ and sits down to eat. By the time you are ready to eat your dessert, it will be several hours; even with refrigeration, ‘dead ripe’ berries will start to sag and weep juice and turn rapidly into mush. Not your best berry for this. Take the berries that are ripe but not soft, hull them, put them in the fridge and then go back to processing the rest of your berries. You can reward yourself later.

And finally, ARE YOU READY? Because Aunt Toby is all about the readiness issues – because just going out to pick anything without having everything in your kitchen right there and in place for when you get home is a first class ticket to fruit being thrown out into the compost heap.

Fruit picked today must be processed today. Say that three times and remember it.

If you don’t have time to process fruit today – then do NOT pick it today. it will NOT be nice fresh fruit tomorrow, no matter how much you refrigerate it. It will still be ‘yesterday’s fruit’. So, here are the shopping lists – have these things available BEFORE you go to pick. You do not want to have to stop at the store on the way back, with 15 pounds of strawberries sitting in the back seat of your car and an inside the car temperature rising every moment you are in the store trying to find an item. Trust me. Fruit does NOT get improved by that. And here’s a note – at my local ‘large regional supermarket chain”, there is a large canning display: canners, equipment, vinegar, bags of sugar, flats of jars and bands and lids. Just the reminder I need to ‘get it now’ – because I KNOW (from having this happen to me many many times before) that when I want to do peaches in August – all those jars and lids and equipment are going to go ‘poof’ and I will be in a bad spot. Get the stuff you need NOW.

Shopping and Equipment Lists:

Getting them clean once you get the berries into the house: the biggest colander you can find.

Jam: (and this is for regular cooked on the stove jam; freezer jams are a whole different deal)

–Jars with bands and new lids to match. Check your jar inventory now and check the jars: anything with cracks, chips at the top, etc. should be put into recycling. Treat yourself to new jars. You’ll be washing and rinsing the jars and heating them up in your oven.

–Big, honkin’ stainless steel or aluminum pot or dutch oven. Definitely something that will hold a lot and also provide even heating.

– Heat Proof ladle, jar funnel, jar lifter, pot to heat water and sterilize the lids and bands

– Sugar. Lots and lots of white sugar. Yes, Aunt Toby knows that there are recipes for jams made with honey, stevia and goodness knows what else. This is the traditional ‘tastes like your grandma’s’ jam. White, out of a bag, sugar. Do yourself a favor and just buy three 5-pound bags of sugar. You’ll need about 4-5 cups of sugar for every 10 cups of whole fresh berries. I know people talk about using other sweeteners like honey – but the problem is that many of these alternatives also have flavors that change the flavor and/or texture of the jam.
Great instructions on making strawberry jam: Strawberry Jam

Freezing:
Containers or ziplock(tm) bags. Seal-a-meal(tm)
For the method we use here at Chez Siberia, you will also need: cookie sheets.

Drying:
Dehydrator
Containers – ziplock(tm) bags, Seal-a-meal(tm), glass jars.
Waxed paper if you are producing fruit leathers and want to roll it up like ‘Fruit Roll-ups’ ™

If you want internet resources for all of this sort of thing including canning books (you DO have a good canning book, right? Well, if you do not, then go to one of the resources listed here): Introduction to Canning

For more on strawberries, go here:
All Strawberries Weekend
Buy Local

(Jam photo courtesy of girl_onthe_les’)

Well, Aunt Toby realized that she missed out on an entire section of stuff that gets sold at farmers markets (and increasingly gets sold, I might add), which is meat.

Honest to gosh, shrink wrapped (though usually not on a slab of Styrofoam, in my experience), frozen, labeled with weights on ‘em, meat. And many times, they are labeled with words such as ‘free range’, ‘pasture raised’, ‘grass fed’ and so on. This is to differentiate them from what’s in your butcher or supermarché, which generally is ‘conventionally raised meat’ which means “grain raised”.

And when you see ‘grain raised’, the little voice of reason in your head should be saying, “and that means, ‘corn fed’.”

Not that ranchers and feedlot operators do not feed animals other grains to ‘finish’ off the animals that they are raising for slaughter (and when they say ‘finish’ what they are talking about is NOT ‘finishing the process of growing’ although that is what is happening; they mean ‘putting a finish on and into the meat’ and by that, they mean – fattening the animal up). Most feed rations out there have a combination of grains in them: wheat, corn, rapeseed, alfalfa, etc. Feed Ingredients

But the king of feed grains, due to its price and due to what it does to animals that eat it, is corn. Corn is King.

When the DH and I were raising chickens, lambs and goats for market, we especially used corn in the ration we fed in the winter time because of what was referred to as ‘heat’ – if it was especially cold, a little corn in the ration would keep the animals warmer. Why? Because corn has fat in it that animals can use to keep themselves warm in really cold weather. But in conventionally raised animals, corn feeding causes the muscles (the meat) to contain a relatively higher ratio of one sort of fatty acid than of others. That fatty acid is: Omega 6.

Now, Aunt Toby is not going to get into a discussion about ‘good fat’ and ‘bad fat’ or this Omega vs. that Omega. The human body requires a little bit of all of them; it is the balance that causes all the mischief.
Omega-3 Fatty Acid
Omega-6 Fatty Acid

What I AM going to talk about (because Aunt Toby is all about the pragmatic aspects) is some basic facts about ‘grass-fed’ vs conventionally-raised meats and should you choose to buy them, what you can do to get the best out of the meat.

Because if you try to cook pasture raised meats the same way you cook conventionally-raised meats, your garbage can is going to be very very happy and you will be going back to your farmer and saying, “I want my money back; this tasted like my shoes”.

First things first: Nutritionally, what are the differences between grass raised/pasture raised meats and conventionally raised meats?
1) No matter how you measure it, pasture raised meats have much less overall fat than conventionally raised (grain fed) meat.
2) No matter how you measure it, pasture raised meats have a much smaller % of Omega 6 fatty acids in them than grain fed meat.
3) Grass fed meats have vitamins that conventionally raised meats lack or have much less of. Health Benefits of Grass-Raised meats

From a cooking and “putting on the plate” aspect, what do the first two items mean for consumers?

In meat (whether beef, pork, chicken, turkeys, lamb, etc.), it is fat that carries the flavor of the meat. Let’s not fool ourselves in this – for all the push by the health community toward low fat meats, we’ve ended up with some meats and some cuts of meats that frankly taste like paper towels because they have so little fat in them. At the same time, the lower the percentage of fat in the meat, the more time and care must be taken by consumers to cook it so that it will taste good, feel good in your mouth, cut well and so on. And unfortunately, consumers still think that they can throw a piece of meat or a quarter of a chicken on a grill or into an oven with a high temperature and get something memorable.

Well, it’s memorable all right but it’s not a memory that they want.

Secondly, by any measure, the higher the Omega 6 fatty acids in meat, the higher the temperature can be in the oven or on the grill. I am not an organic chemist, but the difference in cooking conventionally raised chicken and pasture raised could not be more dramatic. With conventional, I can put a piece of chicken in my oven set anywhere between 375 degrees F and 400 degrees F. The fat starts to liquefy very quickly – I can move that piece of chicken from a raw state to the plate in 30-45 min. (depending on whether or not this is boneless chicken or bone-in). Because there is so much fat in the bird, both inside the muscle and on top of the muscle and under the skin, I not only can quickly cook this bird (and get that crispy skin that will cause us all to end up with cancer, right?), but I’m internally basting the muscles with the liquefied fat that is being drawn off the bird by the high heat. The chicken itself does not have a whole lot of flavor to it – a large part of that is the breed (Cornish-Rock crosses which are bred to be the ‘beanstalk’ chickens of the battery world – these go from chick to Styrofoam in 6-8 weeks. They literally have not had time for the muscles to mature enough to gain any flavor) – but the other part of it is that the high heat is moving the flavor-carrying item, the fat, off the muscles much too quickly. At the same time, however, consumers will end up with meat that is cooked and relatively moist.

With pasture raised chicken and turkey, I have to be much more careful. I have to use my meat thermometer a lot because I am looking for a very specific temperature. I have to give myself several hours to cook the bird because I’m starting it at 325 and moving it to 350. No more. It seems to take a very long time, relatively speaking, for the fat to start coming out (and dressed pasture raised birds do not have nearly the same amount of visible fat – unlike conventionally raised birds, I am definitely not taking out great handfuls of fat from the internal cavities and so on). Pasture raised meats cannot be cooked under high heat conditions – because of the low percentage of fat and because of the ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 fatty acids in the meat, if I try to cook them the same way I can cook conventionally raised meats, I will end up with something resembling shoes. Anyone who has cooked game or wild meats will have the same experience. LOW and SLOW. Pasture raised meats are not something you can leave out on the counter when you leave for work, throw into a hot oven when you get home, and hope to have an edible meal on the table in 45 min. That is a given.

So, if you as a consumer would like to move your family to pasture raised meats (and there are all sorts of good, honest, health and local economic reasons for doing so), my advice to you is this:

1) Get big honkin’ cuts of pasture raised meats: roasts, a turkey, a big roasting chicken.
2) Use your weekends to slowly and tenderly cook this item so that you can have a lovely weekend dinner (hoo-wee – remember those?).
3) Then either slice it up and package for the freezer to be used later on or use it over the week for sandwiches, sliced with gravy for dinners, etc. etc. You will have lovely, flavorful, cooked meat which you as a time-stressed consumer can use as you need it. You won’t have to fire up the oven or grill under stressed conditions.

At the same time, I know there are some readers who are saying to themselves, “But Aunt Toby – pasture raised meats are soooo much more expensive than conventionally raised.”

Yep – Aunt Toby is not going to lie to you – the price per pound is going to be more. But the question comes down to this (and Aunt Toby has discussed this before in terms of price per pound of protein): when you buy meat, what are you buying? What should you be buying?

You buy meat for – protein. That’s what you want to get out of this relationship – not fat and certainly not the type of fat that appears to cause cardio vascular disease and inflammatory syndromes. I’m not saying the pasture raised meats are not expensive – they cost a lot more per pound than conventional ones do – but I am fairly sure that considering what consumers get out of eating them in terms of health benefits, in terms of not paying for fat that gets cooked off, in terms of greater flavor, that they just might be worth it. This is of course totally ignoring the locally grown aspects and the facts that you can, nose to nose, ask the producer exactly what has been given to the animals, how they were treated, and so on. That is ‘feel good’ stuff and is very difficult to quantify – but worth considering in any case.

So, remember, low and slow. We learned this at a wonderful ‘grass fed grilling’ workshop that was arranged by our county Cooperative Extension in support of local grass fed meat producers. If you want one, call and ask your Cooperative Extension or suggest it to the manager of your local farmers market. It will really open your eyes to how meat should taste and feel.

For more information on grass fed meats and how to cook them:

Grass Fed Cooking
Texas Grass Fed Beef
Grass Fed Cooking Tips

(Grass fed roast chicken at the top, courtesy of my son, who followed the directions and produced a really delicious bird, along with roasted carrots, potatoes, and onions. If he can do it, so can you)

The business end of these tales usually involve the fact that it’s someone’s grandmother – who was canning in 1925, using the dial canner technology of the time…was not watching the damn canner (and did not ‘leave for a moment’ – but actually went outside to yell at one of the other kids – and had to chase the dog out of the garden and then decided to pick some corn for supper and so on)…and Cousin CindyLou got burned – because she opened the top or took the weight off the vent tube before things were cold inside. As for the windows blowing out – well, Aunt Toby suspects that there is a little bit of dramatic license being taken there to justify the fact that they never used the pressure canner again.

I think there is also this tremendous number of people out there who would like to can but who are terrified that they will blow up the house. Folks – it ain’t 1925.

Here we have a photograph (courtesy of my on-the-spot camera guy) where I am showing two of the three major safety systems in modern (post 1980) pressure canners. The handy fork is pointing toward the vent. That’s what you put the weight on and the steam coming out of that causes the weight to jiggle. My finger is pointing to the overpressure valve. If somehow the vent got plugged and too much pressure built up inside the canner, there is a button that would pop up, like one of those temperature gauges that’s installed in some turkeys – only on the pressure canner, it would release the extra steam. The third part of the safety system, which you can’t see in this photograph is a spring-loaded safety pin that is under one of the handles – this pushes on the rubber gasket that goes inside the lid and prevents the canner from becoming pressurized unless the top is completely sealed and locked down.

Here are a couple of hard facts that just might help you over some of your fear –
1) Pressure canner design and technology went through a complete change in the 1970s and 1980s. Any pressure canner made since that time is safe as long as it is operated according to instructions. And if you remember a couple of things, you should have no safety issues whatsoever:
a. First – don’t over fill the thing. In general, whatever capacity the canner says it has in terms of numbers of quart jars or pint jars, that is all you can get in there. As a matter of fact, in terms of pint jars because you’d be putting them on top of one another, I’d put in one jar less.

b. Secondly – do a safety check before you put anything into it. Hold the lid up to a light( your kitchen window, a lamp) and look out through the vent from underneath the lid. You should see clear through. If you can’t, then wash the lid and put a pipe cleaner or a piece of wire up through the vent and run it back and forth until it is completely clean. Plugged vents are a major contributor to pressure issues with pressure canners. pressure canner safety systems

c. Third – Do you know how old your pressure canner is? Is this a legacy from YOUR grandmother? Is it something you picked up at a garage or estate sale? Do you know if it was ever dropped (aluminum can sustain hidden damage and that could end up with catastrophic results). Although I am sure that someplace on this earth, there is someone who collects old pressure canners or even pressure canner dials, It is definitely NOT worth the safety issues if you do not know when the thing was made. On the other hand, even if it was built after 1980 and was used with tender loving care, it still might need to have the gasket or other safety parts replaced. If it’s too much of a bargain to resist, look on the bottom or elsewhere on the canner, find the manufacturer and model number and call/email/write the manufacturer to find out how old it is and how safe it is to use. If the manufacturer no longer exists – well, you can always plant flowers in it. Here is a great resource to identify Mirro pressure canners. Identifying a canner

d. Once you put the jars into the canner and close it…hang around for a while. Listen while the canner vents the air (it makes a real ‘shhhhhh’ shound) and arrange to do things in the kitchen. Don’t figure you can wander around the house, clean the bathroom, check on this or that. You are canning. You don’t have to watch the canner every second, but stay in the room.

More resources on canning and canners:
Used Canners

Uni. GA, using pressure canners
Canning 101

Creative Blog on Canning – this story is about the exploding pressure canner
Another Canning Blog

Now, Aunt Toby was wracking her brains after she posted about canning because for the life of me, I could not recall why exactly we chose the model of canner that we did. We did not get one of those with a dial. And then I read this, courtesy of Miss Vickie: “Most problems with pressure canners is a gauge that is not working properly or needs to be calibrated. If the gauge is out of calibration, it will need to be replaced, or in some cases it may be sent back to the manufacturer for re-calibration. Check with your manufacturer to see if they offer this service and the cost. Even newer canners should be tested to ensure the safety of the food being processed. Dial gauges should be tested annually or more often if used frequently.
Your local Cooperative Extension may perform this test for you or provide information on how to get this done. In some cases the manufacturer may be able to test their various models, or even cookers made be other manufacturers. Contact manufacturers directly and inquire if testing services are available and be prepared to pay a modest fee for this service, as well as shipping costs both ways. Often, especially in the case of large, old-fashioned canners, the costs of shipping out weigh the actual value of the vessel.” Testing Dial Canners

THAT’S WHY – I figured that anything that required that sort of maintenance, testing, calibration, and whoopdeedoo was not worth having if I could get something that just jiggled, never needed to be tested and could be maintained by checking the vent and replacing the gasket on a regular basis.
The other thing is this – let’s say for the sake of argument that you don’t know beans about canning. Nothing. At all. Even with what I’m saying here (and I am trying my best to be as encouraging as I possibly can be because I think canning stuff is a great way to have great food available to you especially during emergencies), I am going to recommend something: Call your county Cooperative Extension and ask if they have classes in canning. If they don’t – ask them to consider putting one together, even if it means that you have to gather up your friends, coworkers and your mother in law to fill up the class. This is a life skill that really pays off. You never know – your extension might even have a commercial type kitchen with really big time canning equipment so that you don’t have to go out and buy your own (though it’s great to have your own canner – trust me on that). Here is a link that will get you to a place where you can find any extension office anywhere in the US of A. How to Find Your Closest Cooperative Extension Office

OK..everyone feeling a little bit better about the whole pressure canning business now? Remember, your grandmother’s story about the exploding pressure canner … was just a story..that’s right…just a story…..

(Photo at the top courtesy of bookgrl)

So, what can you put into a jar and process vs. what doesn’t work really well processed in a jar?

Well, anything you can find in your grocery store that comes already in a can will work well for you. Think about what you pick up from the shelves at your supermarket – whatever it is – YOU can do that, too, whether it is your own ‘bread and butter pickles’ or spaghetti sauce or beans or zucchini with mushrooms and onions in tomato sauce or apple pie filling or blueberries or whatever you want. The DH and I once, early in our married life found a terrific deal on chickens and we cut them up into pieces, put them in jars with broth and made canned chickens – the meat was rather soft, I admit – it was really only good for things like chicken salad sandwiches or chicken and biscuits later on, but it was there.

Canning, however, does not work for everything. Think of the things that you can’t find in cans in the store and only find in the freezer case: broccoli is one. On the other hand, many many things can be frozen – but they really don’t taste as good as canned – green beans is one of them. Frozen fruits are great…but not as good as canned (the only exception Aunt Toby has found is strawberries; the only way I can preserve strawberries in the jar is to make…strawberry preserves; plain old sliced up strawberries really work better as a frozen product. And frankly, I’d rather just eat them fresh).

As exotic as sticking stuff into jars and processing them sounds, remember something: This is one of the methods that people used to ‘put things by’ before there was such a thing as home freezers. And it really is pretty fail-safe. If a jar loses its seal – you can pretty much tell as soon as you pick it up off the shelf – remember that ‘push the button’ on the center of the lid? If that happens, throw that product away. It is no good. On the other side after you’ve processed the jar and put it on the shelf, if the lid is bulging at all, that’s another key that there are bacteria growing in the jar and generating gas – that jar is not safe to eat – open it up, throw the contents down the toilet. You can wash out the jar and use that again, but not the lid.

The key to canning safely is three things: clean good quality food, clean jars, clean lids and the whole thing processed properly. Trust me – the DH and I did not come from families that canned – we learned everything from out of a book and no one at Chez Siberia has gotten sick yet. In this photograph, you see the beginnings of the process: The person doing this has washed the jars really well and is draining them before putting them into the oven to heat them up. What we’re also not seeing is a pot of water on the stove with the lids and bands in it heating up, nor are we seeing the bowls of fruit, or veggies or chili or soup, or stew that is ready for putting into the jars, to be sealed up, put into the canner and processed. But let that picture remind you of THE most important thing in terms of food safety: clean, good quality food, clean (and hot) jars, lids and bands, and following the processing instructions(which will run something like “process for xx minutes at yy pounds of pressure”).

A short piece of ‘extreme bias’ here — Pressure canner vs. ‘water bath canner’. Water bath canning is a huge pot of water on your stove that you put the jars in, cover the pot and just keep the water at a certain temperature for a certain period of time. IT ACTUALLY CAN ONLY BE USED FOR ACID FOODS LIKE TOMATOES. Not pink or yellow or orange tomatoes, mind you (those are low acid types) – and even red ones might not be acid enough. And if you mix your tomatoes with something else, like onions or zuccini, it’s not safe at all. The pots are huge things. I used them early on, but never liked it and now we don’t have the space for the pots. At the same time, the prime time to can is summer – using a water bath canner releases a huge amount of moisture and heat into the kitchen. A pressure canner is a much better idea: uses less energy, does not release all that heat and humidity, and you can use it for everything: green beans, meat sauce, tomatoes, fruit, meat. Everything. Why keep space for two different technologies when one will do all the job?

Here are some resources to help you get started, whether it is finding supplies, recipes, books, and so on.

Supplies and Canner Parts:
Cooking and Canning
Canning Pantry
Pick Your Own – Canning Supplies
Store It Foods – Canning

Canning Instructions and Videos:
All About Canning
Canning Videos 1
Canning Videos 2

Recipes:
Canning Recipes1
Canning Recipes2
Meat1
Meat2

One of the things you will want to know to get started is – how much xxx do I want to end up with? Not that you want to sit down and think, “How many big cans of tomatoes do I use in a year?” – you’d be canning tomatoes forever. But if you want a case of quarts of canned tomatoes, you will need to get your head around some basic measures so that whether you buy at the farmers market, go and pick your own or whatever, you will have a pretty decent idea of how many jars you will end up with. Here is a great charge that shows how many pounds are in a bushel of xxx. Scroll down from the top to find the fruits and veggies section.How much is in a bushel?

Really do get a good canning book; it is worth it to have on the shelf. Now my favorite book, which I got years ago, Farm Journal’s Freezing and Canning Cookbook, (and by the way, any book that you find put out by Farm Journal is worth having, so try used book sites, etc. to find them because I think they are OOP) says, for example, that for a bushel of tomatoes(which weighs about 53 pounds), you will get 20 canned quarts. A bushel of green snap beans, 15-20 canned quarts. So, think about what you want to end up with so that you don’t end up standing in a steaming kitchen at 2 a.m. and cursing yourself.

The other thing to think about is this: When you are doing your own processing, you are in complete control of what goes into that jar. One of the things is energy – no matter what happens later, the only energy you have used is the electricity or LP (or whatever form of heat you use) used with the canning process. After that, you are not using any energy to keep that food safe. One time energy use — unlike freezing where you continue to use energy in the freezer until you take the food out to eat it. Secondly, all food made in a pressure canner has been ‘cooked in the jar’ – if you had no energy, you could still open it up and eat it. Again. one time energy use. Second control is food quality: If you don’t want salt in your canned beans, you don’t need to put it in – you are using a pressure canner, so you don’t need salt for that (making pickled things is another issue). If you don’t want to can your fruit with syrups, you don’t have to – you can process them with plain water(and they actually make a really tasty juice that way, too). If you want to put a clove of garlic in the jar with the beans, you can do that (and by the way, it tastes great that way). But the other part of this is the quality of the stuff that is going into the jar. Commercial processors are not going through the beans one by one or even combing through the bushels. What comes out of the can is never better than what goes INTO it – so make sure that when you buy or pick your fruits, veggies, meats, etc. that they are the freshest you can get. Make sure you also wash everything really really well (organic doesn’t necessarily mean ‘spotlessly clean’). If you pick a tomato out of the bushel and there is a spot on it, even if it’s been washed – cut it out. Make sure that the product that you are putting into the jar and processing has its best chance of tasting fantastic when you open that jar back up. If you are processing stone fruits – peaches, cherries and so forth, make sure you get all the pits out (and with peaches, you are also going to want to dip them in boiling water for a bit and then into ice water to loosen up the skins so that you can take those off and get rid of them before you cut up the peaches and put them into the jars).

When you have finished with processing, and the jars are all cool and you’ve wiped them off with a damp cloth or a sponge, you can then put them away. If you don’t have a celler to store them, put the jars right back into the case boxes that you bought them in and label them so that you know what you have and when you made them. Put the cases into a closet, under the livingroom couch or your bed..wherever you can room to stash them. It’s your private food bank account. No matter what happens in terms of storms when you can’t get to the grocery store or losing your power, you’ve got a whole lot of food that is already pre-cooked, safe and edible.

Bon Appetit!
(photograph courtesy of Baha’i Views)

Aunt Toby, the DH and all the little Chez Siberians(who are not longer so little, nor are they in residence), have experienced this. Thunderstorms that knocked power out for hours. Ice storms in the winter that have snapped trees in half on top of power lines and left us without power to run the blower on the furnace for days at a time. Gentlemen at the control of backhoes who..well, we won’t talk about the whole ‘call before you dig’ from people who won’t.

The results are the same. No power. It doesn’t matter if you live in New York City, Bugtussle, Idaho, Chez Siberia, or any place else. If you don’t have power, there are certain basic things that do not function. If you live in a rural area, there are an additional group of things that cease to function as well and we will discuss those at a later date.

One of the things that just stops (though for a while it can provide a certain amount of function) is a refrigerator. Freezers are in the same category. Now, if you lose your power for only a couple of hours – even a day – if you have a freezer full of frozen food and no one does the obvious thing and opens it up (why do that? Really? You’ve looked in there a zillion times; the freezer does not contain anything new or wondrous in it just because the substation down the road got zapped because a squirrel decided that the coating on a cable looked appetizing. Trust me on that one), then you are pretty safe. Once the power goes on, you are good to go. If you lose the power and it’s longer than a day, then we’re talking real damage to food. Another thing that stops is all other electric appliances such as washers, dryers and cooking devices and a stove.

Ah – frozen food and no stove to cook it with.

Even if this occurs during the summer (and if you live in a city, you have additional troubles if the power cuts out for more than a day in a place like New York City in August – we’re talking dangerous) so you don’t have issues with heating (just keeping cool), you still have issues with keeping fed and not losing the food you have to spoilage.

So, Aunt Toby is going to suggest something radical, cutting edge, green…even.

It’s time to think about preserving food in ways that do not require the constant application of electric energy. Those ways are canning and drying (there are certain things that really only work well with freezing, but we will discuss that at another time as well since the case being made here is to use preservation techniques that if the electricity goes out, it won’t make any difference at all). And also time to think about cooking food in ways that do not use electric power and possibly do not even use things like propane tanks, charcoal or other fuels. It’s one thing to do a little bit of a grill out on the deck; it’s quite another thing if it’s the middle of the winter and you are faced with nothing but a fireplace or a woodstove in your house and firing up the hibachi just might be the most dangerous thing you can do.

So, in her new resolution to actually perform what she says she’s going to perform, Aunt Toby is planning this: A multipart series on Canning, Drying, and cooking when you don’t have your usual venues at your disposal, plus an extra added series on freezing. How does that sound to you? Everyone like that? Good.

And in the meantime, to whet people’s appetites, here is an article from a recent copy of the New York Times about gourmet canning. Time in a Bottle

And commit the song at the top to memory.

Update: Mr. Weiner, the gentleman mentioned above, succumbed to H1N1 and died Sunday evening.first swine flu death in New York City

For current updates on H1N1, see US CDC: Swine Flu Update

What Aunt Toby wants to talk about is this: Where the hell did this thing come from? Remember ‘bird flu” – remember all the hooha about THAT? And do you remember what happened with that, either?

Me, neither. Aunt Toby is sort of like everyone else – if it doesn’t come and bang on my door, then I’m not paying attention. And we should all pay a LOT more attention.

NC Hog Farm Birth Site of Flu
“The new H1N1 influenza virus that continues to spread through the United States has ancestry in a swine flu outbreak that first struck a North Carolina hog farm more than 10 years ago, according to scientists studying the strain’s genetic makeup….The current strain’s eight genetic segments are all associated with swine flu, said Raul Rabadan, a Columbia University scientist studying the new H1N1 genetic sequence that was made public this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention….”
“This virus was found in pigs here in the United States,” Rabadan said in an interview. “They were getting sick in 1998. It became a swine virus.”
It spread among pregnant sows in Newton Grove, N.C., causing them to abort their litters. The virus then spread to pigs in Texas, Iowa and Minnesota –putting epidemiologists on alert about the new viral strain and the potential for a human outbreak.
Scientists don’t yet know when or where the current H1N1 strain first emerged. They know only that it was identified after people in Mexico began falling ill with the fevers and aches..”
“ A May 1999 N&O story titled “Disease detectives untangle mystery of mutant flu virus” (available in the paper’s online archives) reported that the 1998 bug — a pig virus “wrapped in a shell of human proteins” — was isolated by a [North Carolina] state government veterinary lab. Similar mutations are suspected in earlier flu outbreaks, including the 1918 Spanish flu that killed more than 20 million people worldwide.
According to that story, the virus was discovered in August 1998 at a 2,400-sow breeding farm owned by Newton Grove, N.C.-based Hog Slat Inc., a leading builder of factory-style hog farms. The company is also one of Sampson County’s largest employers — as is Smithfield Foods, the Virginia-based corporation that owns numerous hog farms near the Mexican community where the earliest case of the current swine flu was identified.” Swine Flu Genes

Smithfield Foods. Remember that name because there is a more recent story about them as well:
“For centuries…peasant farmers here have eked a living from hogs… Old customs and jobs are dying and the air itself is changing, however, transformed by an American newcomer, Smithfield Foods. Almost unnoticed by the rest of the Continent, the agribusiness giant has moved into Eastern Europe with the force of a factory engine, assembling networks of farms, breeding pigs on the fast track, and slaughtering them for every bit of meat and muscle that can be squeezed into a sausage….In less than five years, Smithfield enlisted politicians in Poland and Romania, tapped into hefty European Union farm subsidies and fended off local opposition groups to create a conglomerate of feed mills, slaughterhouses and climate-controlled barns housing thousands of hogs.
It moved with such speed that sometimes it failed to secure environmental permits or inform the authorities about pig deaths — lapses that emerged after swine fever swept through three Romanian hog compounds in 2007, two of which were operating without permits. Some 67,000 hogs died or were destroyed, with infected and healthy pigs shot to stanch the spread.”
Smithfield Takes Over Pig Production in Eastern Europe

Why pigs? Why this and why now?

Pigs are amazing creatures – they have this ability, unknown in any other mammal, to act as a cauldron for viruses (and as a ‘mix and match’ operation as well) of creatures totally unlike pigs. Even totally not mammals – the current ‘swine flu’ is actually a tricky little creature that consists of swine, bird and human virus segments – it’s a ‘threefer’ – and because it’s got that human virus ‘hook’ to it, human beings can get it. And for those folks who are yawning about now, I’d like to remind them that the 1918 flu epidemic which killed tens of millions of people (most between the ages of 15 and 40) around the world, was just such a ‘combo virus’.

Scientists who have been able to extract viral materials from the cadaver of a person struck down by the 1918 flu, have identified that killer virus as another avian-based virus – but how can human beings catch a bird virus? Because it got mutated inside the bodies of swine who can act as the intermediaries of both bird and human viruses – a bird-swine-human virus salad bar.

It stands to reason then that birds and pigs should not be hanging out together in great numbers, right? It really is a ‘no duh’ that we should be giving hogs and birds, especially domesticated birds, a whole lot of air space between them so that they are not playing ‘changing partners’ with their viral material, right?

Well, we don’t. Companies such as Smithfield Foods (and they are not the only villains of the piece here – but they certainly are now the largest and the fastest moving) have taken advantage of modern agricultural technologies and of places where people do not ask a whole lot of questions, to create mega hog farms, putting thousands upon thousands of hogs into confinement conditions, with moist bedding, little air transport, and a whole lotta disease stuff going on. On the Eastern Shore area of Delaware and Maryland, chicken giants such as Purdue do the same exact thing. We will not discuss the environmental impact of this – that’s a discussion for another time. But the outbreak of H1N1 points a finger at the swine flu outbreak in Eastern Europe in 2007 and the bird flu outbreaks in Vietnam and Indonesia in 2004, 2005 and 2006(two places where, interestingly enough, pigs, chickens and other domestic fowl are raised together on a traditional basis) and this year in Egypt and also Vietnam.
Is high concentrated hog and chicken farming lighting the fuse on a killer influenza epidemic on a pandemic scale? And is there anything we can do to slow or stop this?

Well, only scientists can say what they think about pandemics. This is scary stuff and frankly I don’t think any country’s government is ready. Tamiflu is just not going to cut it since viruses hop around and change partners at will and it takes months to come up with a new Tamiflu to combat a new mutation.
But we CAN do something about companies which take advantage of lack of regulation and enforcement to put in high concentrations of hog and bird raising. This type of agricultural practice has turned out to be disastrous from an environmental and public health standpoint. Wouldn’t it be better to look at the alternative? Which is?

Pasture raising. De-centralized agriculture. The way agriculture was in this country before the Second World War. What was raised in a state was, by and large, eaten in the state. I remember reading a study done by Rodale where they looked at how self-sufficient the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was in the 1930s versus how self-sufficient it was in the 1980s. The statistics were staggering – in the 1930s, the vast majority of food that Pennsylvanians ate, all year round, was raised in Pennsylvania. Now, the numbers have flipped; the vast majority of food that people in Pennsylvania eat is raised…elsewhere and trucked or flown in.

We have all gotten so used to eating veggies and fruits out of season through the miracle of long distance refrigerated freight, that we are now at the mercy of what happens in other states. Want a salad in January or February and there is really bad weather in California or Florida? No greens. Want grapes in the spring and something happens in Chile? Out of luck. Want affordable bread and something happens in the Midwest (like what happened to grain stocks a couple of years ago)? Bread gets really really expensive. And so does animal feed – which makes conventionally raised meat and chicken a LOT more expensive.
It really would be better for us all if we supported and encouraged out local (as in state and neighboring states) farmers to grow everything they can, under the healthiest situation they can. That means pasture raising meat, chickens and eggs – no houses with tens of thousands of pigs and birds, releasing thousands of tons of manure at one go. (remember the lagoon failures in North Carolina a couple of years ago? The Cape Fear River still has not come back from that) That also means having farmers return to crops and varieties that worked for them and technologies that work in the state’s environment. In Upstate New York for example, grain farmers are returning to varieties that were grown in the 19th century, and grain mills are being built again. It certainly is not the same sort of stuff that comes out of the Midwest, but it’s here..it’s close..and it will provide an alternative. Tomato growers in Western New York are taking advantage of greenhouse and hydroponic technologies to produce tomatoes all year round. Their tomatoes can be on customers’ tables within hours of picking.

Aunt Toby lives in a county that has not had a large agricultural industry in probably 50 years. Yet – I can go to my farmers’ market and find and buy pasture raised beef, pork, lamb, turkey (pasture raised turkeys?????), chicken and eggs – not from one farmer only, but several. This is amazing – and our county is not exactly what I would call wealthy. We’re not talking Westchester County here – we’re talking about a place that is one of those ‘used to be big in manufacturing’ sorts of places. It is not just a case of ‘kindness’ either(though that is a factor also) – it’s a case of people’s being concerned about their health, the health of the community and the health of the animals: pasture raising integrates manure and other products into the environment in a small, ongoing sort of way. No lagoons to fail. No ungodly ammonia from chicken batteries. Also, no hormones, no antibiotics (to also end up in the environment), and animals getting enough fresh air and sunshine on a daily basis so that they are not subject to viral infections that can be passed on.

The other thing is this: In those huge hen houses and swine farrowing facilities, there are people working under the same conditions as the animals are living – exposed to the ammonia, exposed to the manure, exposed to the diseases, and exposed to the viruses that are being cooked up by the swine. Under pasture raising, the amount of exposure to the animals is actually pretty limited to moving the animals to a new piece of pasture, in the sun and breeze.

A lot safer for all of us.

Concerned about swine flu, avian flu and the role of confinement animal raising in public health? Contact your state health department and your state legislators and demand that these types of operations be stopped. Not grandfathered. Stopped. Torn down. Eliminated. Also Contact the US Agriculture Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and your Congressional Representatives and Senators. What happens in North Carolina and Delaware and other states affects every single one of us. Those Smithfield Farms pigs in Mexico sure did not care that their viruses came from North Carolina – but the folks in Mexico and Texas and now places like Wisconsin and New York City certainly do.

And so should every single one of us.

(illustration courtesy of Hector Aiza Photo courtesy of Farm Sanctuary)