The Beginner's Guide to Preserving Food at Home - Janet Chadwick [1]
The Busy Person’s Dilemma
YOU HAVE THREE CHILDREN UNDER FIVE, the baby cried all night, and your mother-in-law is coming for supper. What are you going to do with that bushel of green beans? Or, it’s Thursday, and you just arrived home after a hard day at the office. You know that if you wait until Saturday to make dill pickles, the cucumbers will be too large; but if you pick them now, they will be punky by Saturday . . . but you don’t feel like pickling until midnight. What are you going to do? Well, take a deep breath and relax. This book is for you.
Vegetable gardening is rapidly becoming the number one American pastime. Escalating food costs, inferior quality products, and aversions to chemical additives have convinced many of us that the best way to provide our families with good food at reasonable costs is to raise it ourselves.
When calculating the savings of a garden and home food processing, many people (always nongardeners) will remark, “Yes, but how much is your time worth?” To answer that question you have to be honest with yourself. Would you really be holding down an extra job during those hours that would net you more cash in the bank? Can you put a price tag on the physical, emotional, and spiritual satisfactions that you derive from working the soil and producing the foods that nourish your family? Is the kind of food you feed your family important to you? Is there any way you can buy the feeling of pride you have at the sight of the full freezer; the rows of canned vegetables, fruits, pickles, jams, and jellies; or the root cellar shelves filled to the ceiling? If these things are not important to you, then maybe you should not be gardening or preserving food, because there is a lot of work involved — but the work should be a joy and a challenge to your ability to be more self-reliant.
I’ve written this book for those of you who garden and hold down outside jobs or are busy with kids and other outside activities. I know that it is hard enough to cope with the normal routine of family, home, and job, along with raising a small garden for fresh summer vegetables, without trying to squeeze in long hours of food preservation at the end of a busy day. But much food can be preserved for storage in the small blocks of time you have available on a daily or weekly basis. This book can be used as a primer if you are new to the art of food preservation, and it’s likely to provide new and exciting ideas to those of you who have been preserving food for years.
How Can This Book Help You?
FREEZING IS THE MOST POPULAR METHOD of food preservation. It’s a great time-saving method, and it produces the best finished product; and so this book will focus strongly on freezing techniques, including some new methods that are even more efficient and produce an even better finished product.
Drying is an ancient method of preserving food, one that is gaining in popularity as people discover how much they enjoy having an inexpensive supply of gourmet Italian dried tomatoes and kid-pleasing fruit leathers. Also, as more and more people grow their own herbs, they find drying a convenient way of preserving that harvest. So I will offer plenty of advice for drying fruits, vegetables, and herbs.
I will also discuss the equipment that is absolutely necessary for food preservation and provide information on other equipment that, while not absolutely required, will make food preservation faster, easier, and in general, result in a better finished product.
For people who are serious about food preservation, I will talk about steps that can be taken year-round to make harvest time easier. Throughout the book, you will find tips to help you make the best use of weekends, weekdays, and overnight hours. These tips will include the best times to harvest vegetables as well as the best ways to keep them fresh for up to three days, so that you can plan to harvest one day and preserve a day or so later.
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