Preserved Menu Planning: Documenting the Stores

Let's say that you really like sauerkraut. Like, a lot. So, you've done your homework and according to the Ball Blue Book of Canning, it takes 20 pounds of cabbage to make a batch. Your seed packages says that each cabbage plant will grow to be about 4-5 pounds so you figure 5 or 6 cabbages ought to do it. 

Sound thinking. Great start.

However, how many quarts of sauerkraut did the recipe actually make? Was this enough or did you find you wanted more when you cleaned out the last jar in January? Could you have fit more than the suggested 20 pounds of cabbage in your 3-gallon crock, thereby getting additional sauerkraut and only marginally increasing the effort? How many pounds of cabbage did you end up using? 

Manageable in and of themselves, if you're trying to do food preservation on a large scale, imagine all of these questions times 40 for each of the various items you'll make to preserve. Even just with the sauerkraut example, it starts to get tricky when you try to remember the following year how many cabbages you need to plan to grow for the 9 quarts of sauerkraut you have decided you want to make...


So, like my last post, the primary goal here is to share the utility of some simple documentation in a) increasing the garden to preserved food learning curve and b) becoming more successful in the pursuit of minimizing the amount of non-local and processed food consumed throughout the year.

Without further ado, here it is: Food Preservation. (There's only one version this time as there are multiple tabbed workbooks at the bottom of the document.) May it be as useful to you as it has been to us...

Our Goal (in case you missed it)