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)

Preserved Menu Planning: Documenting the Garden

Our Gardening Learning Curve

Take note of this year's garden for a better one next.

Admittedly, I am more than finicky when it comes to making lists, so it's possible that I'm over-exaggerating this point. But, that said, with our first garden, we made no records of what we grew, how much we planted, or when we planted it so that when it came time to plan our second garden, we had to rely on memory alone. Obviously, there are limits to memory, and for novice gardeners like us, almost everything is trial and error. So, when something works, it's important to know what it was and it's perhaps even more important with the miserable failures you swear you'll never do again.

Last year - Garden #3 - is when I got fed up enough with not remembering the details that I started  to consider  doing some serious documentation (thanks in large part to my father-in-law's meticulous example). I guess I realized how much darn work gardening is and figured that, if were going to keep it up, we might as well do it right.

The document was simple, a Google Docs spreadsheet called Garden Plants 2010. As you can see by clicking the link, many of the variables it tracked didn't quite pan out (I so quickly got behind on weighing harvest yields that I totally gave up about 5 tomatoes in). However, for the most part, Garden Plants 2010 has been terribly useful in creating the new and improved Garden Plants 2011, my planning document extraordinaire for Garden #4 which, I'm convinced, will be our best garden yet.

The beauty of garden documentation - both record keeping and pre-planning on paper - is its cyclical nature. Taking notes on the current season enables better choices for the coming one. And, pre-planning using mistakes from the past helps identify new experiments in improved methods whose results you can record to in turn inform future gardens.

Garden Documentation Cycle

For us, one example of this is tomato blight, a disease the turns plant leaves yellow and sickly. Research suggests that one factor in preventing blight in making sure tomatoes have enough space between them. Last year, our records show about 2 square feet per plant. This year, my pre-plan is to give each plant about 3 square feet. During the season, I know to take note of the blight we get (or hopefully don't get), and we'll know better for planning next year's garden. (Ahh, the beauty of closed cycles...)

Sounds logical, right? But wait! You're not getting the whole picture. You see, there is one more set of instrumental recording/planning documents in the process. How do you know how much of each type of plant to grow for preserving? Well friends, I will share that method tomorrow....

Preserved Menu Planning: 101

Over Josh and my three winters of eating primarily our own preserved food, we've learned a bit about the process. By and large, this knowledge can be boiled down to three take-home lessons.

Preserver's Food Pyramid

First and foremost, substantial food preservation requires year-round planning, from what to grow (February) and how to preserve it (June-November) to figuring out satisfying pairings for frozen entrees with pickled side dishes and taking note for the following season (November-June).

Second, in order to avoid wanting to swear off food all together by February, variety in flavor and texture is essential. Easier said than done when everything is dropped in boiling water, dehydrated, or frozen, let me tell you...

Finally, realistic expectations are a must. Enough said.

So, in part because it'll be another 4 weeks before I can start seeds and have prime blogging content (photos too!),  I present another installment I'm calling "Preserved Menu Planning." Each post in the series will take on one of the three issues outlined above, sharing the food preservation wisdom we've gathered (albeit limited) along the way. Though I'll be discussing these things in the context of our efforts to minimize the amount of food we buy at the grocery store, I hope the communal knowledge will be useful to anyone and anyone interested in the topic, regardless of scale. 

Until next time...

On Location: Holland, Michigan (Part II)

DAY 2

There we were: hungry on a Sunday morning in a town where nothing opens on this day of rest until around noon... except for the Windmill Restaurant. I think every small town has its own version of the Windmill, that diner you can rely on to be constantly busy, to always have decent but not great food, and to never fail to decorate for a holiday (in this case, Valentine's Day). For breakfast, I had a "Birdnest" (over-medium eggs on top of a plate of hashbrowns with feta cheese) and it did not disappoint. 

The plan was to find Lake Michigan which, conveniently, exists as part of Holland State Park. There's something really amazing about big bodies of water, but I am very particular that they are bodies of fresh water. Maybe I should be embarrassed of just how midwestern this will make me sound, but oceans freak me out. Having spent too many summers looking forward to the end of August when the local lake or bay would finally reach 65 or so degrees, salt water is just too warm (then again, I don't particularly like baths either). Not to mention the veritable zoo of things to step on,  feel against your legs, and/or get bitten by. Nope. For my own experiences with water, it's fresh water in person, the ocean via Planet Earth.

Break Wall

When we found the lake, it was like nothing I'd ever seen, an arctic tundra with ice formations lining the shore and snow drifts covering the break wall (diversion: I think it's interesting that "break wall" is part of most Michigander's vocabulary, an indication of the very central role the Great Lakes play in our culture and interaction with the natural world). I'd venture to say that, for most, Lake Michigan connotes summer weekends and the easiness, seagulls, and familial gatherings that come with them. In summer, sand masks the sound of human feet while  children's laughter and waves provide the ambiance. 

That day was in all senses the summer version of Lake Michigan's diametric opposite. Barren and strange, the landscapes were hard to understand with the overarching quiet stillness emphasized by crunching footsteps. And yet, though the lake did nothing to provide the comfortable familiarity of the archetypal bright orange pail and a sandcastle experience, she was uniquely accessible. Instead of swimming a few feet into combative waves, we walked freely hundreds of yards onto still ice. The sharp boulders lining the break wall that make parents hold more tightly to their children were merely  pebbles sticking up through the snow as a man led a dog attached to a sled pulling two young girls around them.

There was a certain sense of comradery at the beach that day. When you and yours are among hundreds, its easy and sometimes even the objective to ignore other beachgoers, but that day we belonged to a handful who were interested in enjoying the other personality of the lake. Or maybe it wasn't that. Maybe it was just that, even though most of us there had taken physical science in 6th grade, we were bonded by our awe.  

Thank you for indulging my poetic waxation. For your patience, I will conclude with a few images from our day at the beach. (Please take note of just how large those ice formations were and imagine them lining the entire beach front...)

Ice Queen



The Tundra of Lake Michigan

Joshua

On Location: Holland, Michigan (Part I)



Holland, Michigan



This past weekend, Josh and I took a short "beat the February blues" trip to Holland, Michigan. We left Saturday morning around 10am, arrived by 12:30pm, and left Sunday around 2pm. Though we have just over 24 hours of experience with the town and community, our conclusion is that Holland has a lot to recommend it...

DAY 1

Our trip started with lunch at the New Holland Brewing Company pub, which - in addition to what Josh tells me is great beer - also makes its own spirits. Overall the food was good (a decent vegetarian selection, promotion of local products, and house made corned beef), the ambiance great (a huge multi-tiered building with ample natural light and a beautiful copper brewing system in plain view), and the experience a positive way to make a first impression. With full stomachs and a whole lot of enthusiasm, we set off to explore the city by foot.

Some of what we saw:

• Hope College campus - beautiful architecture and pleasant small college feel
• Kollen Park - a very cute green space integrated into the downtown region with walkways along Lake Macatawa, playgrounds, and vistas
• Heinz Pickle Factory - the largest in the world (we could actually see the giant pickle barrels for fermentation and smell the brine)
• "Ice Melt" sidewalk system - genius method of recycling hot water waste from the power plant by running it through piping under the downtown sidewalks to melt the snow and ice (seriously, these sidewalks were spotless)
• Farmers' Market space - nice covered area next to the civic centerW

In all truth, we ended up seeing quite a bit more than that. You see, Josh and I are pretty serious walkers. We lived for a year without a car, solidifying our habit of relying on our own two feet (and occasionally our bikes) to get where we need to go (including the 2 mile commute to and from work everyday). My thought is that it's good for the environment and it's good for us, so we're no strangers to prolonged series of one foot in front of the other. That said, even by our standards, our trek through Holland was pretty epic, totaling somewhere around 8 miles according to Google maps.

"The Holland Hike" Walking Route

The beauty of pedi-exploration is that you get to see a good deal that might otherwise go unnoticed, the details that require proximity and a slower pace to register. For instance, on top of seeing some of the attractions listed above, we also got a feel for the lay of the city. Many of the houses downtown seemed to be rental properties, and not just the ones near the campus. Ann Arbor has its fair share of "student ghettos" in the downtown area (which these weren't), but still, for us it was hard to imagine that walking further away from town would bring us closer to the kind of neighborhood we were looking for. 

It's hard to qualify exactly, but right around when we turned off South Shore Drive and onto Graafschap, all of a sudden we started to feel more like we'd found something. For instance, each lot was nearly an acre, people were outside shoveling snow and doing other household chores, there was even a small stream that ran through a series of backyards. This just felt like a good place...

CityFlats Hotel in Holland, Michigan

What we ended up settling on (at least for the time being) is that if we were to live in Holland, we would look for a house 2 or so miles from the downtown area. This would give us enough land for some serious gardens, we'd still be walkable to the town center, and we'd be privy to a good neighborly feel (literally every person we passed - and we passed a number - said hello). 

Our walk concluded around 5pm, when we wandered back to the car and drove over to CityFlats Hotel to check-in. In addition to being pleasantly modern, exceptionally clean, and very comfortable, the hotel is LEED gold certified, meaning it lives up to certain environmental stewardship standards. With tired feet and good consciences, we enjoyed the hotel amenities and prepared for our second day in what might someday be our new hometown...

TO BE CONTINUED

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

According to the 2010 census, Michigan was the only state in the union to see a population loss for the first decade of the twenty-first century (source: mlive.com). 54,000 people smaller than it was only ten years ago, Michigan has two residents who aren't leaving... no way, no how.

Like any recent college grads, Josh and I have been slowly pondering where we want to live our adult lives. For now, we have a house in Ann Arbor that we love and jobs that are allowing us to do what we need to do, but we don't plan to be here forever.

So, where do we go? With the world of possibility available to us in our youthful enthusiasm, we've chosen to greatly scale down the scope of our options and stay in the state of Michigan.

We love the Great Lakes state for any number of reasons and we feel a commitment to doing whatever we can to help to our community, the state-wide community, get back on its feet.  As we see it, there's a lot of opportunity here for those willing to seize it and as long as we have something to offer and the will/ability to give it, here we'll stay.

In short, to fulfill our personal, professional, and life goals, we are in the process of seeking a place in Michigan that fulfills our various "residential" desires. In other words, we're looking for a community with...

• Agricultural roots, including any or all of the following:
• Land available for us to purchase and live on (homesteading, anyone?)
• Farmers' Market(s)
• Community Sponsored Agriculture (CSA) farm
• Community garden plots
• People who appreciate, respect, and engage in hard work - often the product of having agricultural or industrial roots
• Downtown center - I living close to where people gather, be it coffee shops, grocery stores, hardware stores, or any other number of public spaces (this also makes green transportation - i.e. your legs or a bike - much easier to use frequently)
• Scenic beauty - lakes, rivers, forests, parks, whatever
• Ample space for recreation in natural areas
• A basis for life-long learning - some sort of institute for higher or continuing education
• An emphasis on community - community development, community action, taking care of one another
• Diversity - not only in race, but in age, thought, culture, belief, etc.
• A relatively small population both in the community itself as well as in the surrounding area - i.e. no more metro or suburban space for us

That's the criteria and the time frame is 3-5 years (though we're relatively flexible). In support of this project, from time to time I'll be sharing our explorations in a series I'm calling "On Location." Tomorrow will be the first installment, reporting on our recent weekend trip to Holland, Michigan. Below is a teaser photo of me and a frozen Lake Michigan. Stay tuned for more...

Navigating Lake Michigan at Holland State Park in February

Set It and Forget It!

When I was about 12 or so, my dad and I got caught in the hypnotic messaging of an infomercial and bought a rotisserie cooker from Ron Popeil, "the King of 'Set It and Forget It.'" I've included an example of the advertisement below, but I will not be held responsible for any poor purchasing judgment that results...

Anyway, when we received the contraption in the mail 3-5 weeks later, we eagerly stuffed it with a five pound chicken and, as the instructions prompted, we set it and forgot it.

Well, it turns out you can't effectively cook chicken with a light bulb which is essentially what this thing tried to do. Disappointed and with wounds that would keep me forever skeptical of television advertisements, we asked for our money back guarantee (minus shipping and handling) and sent the rotisserie back.

I should have known then that (for the most part) anything my father and I agreed upon so excitedly was probably a bad idea. I should have also realized that it was really my mother who had the "set it and forget it" technology we were seeking. About once a week, she in her infinite wisdom would pull out the crock pot she'd received years prior as a wedding present and make something delicious with very little effort. 

As an adult, I won't say that I've become wiser, but I have at least learned a few things about mimicking good ideas. So, like my mother, I am the proud owner of two slow cookers, one 4-quart (for everyday cooking) and one 12-quart (for large-batch freezing/canning).

I cannot recommend this cooking tool highly enough, especially for those looking to preserve their own food. You'll find a use for it throughout the process: In August, when it comes time to can tomato sauce, no method is easier for reducing the volume of the tomatoes than letting them simmer for 18-28 hours in a slow cooker (and it doesn't heat up the house as much as a stove). In February, when it comes to throwing frozen ingredients together to make an easy and  tasty chili (see recipe below), the choice is obvious.

As proof of my undying affection for the convenience of my slow cookers, I'll leave you with an impromptu recipe for vegetarian chili that provided a healthy and satisfying dinner last night (prepped it Sunday night around 8pm, turned off and stored the entire slow cooker in the cold garage before work around 7am on Monday, reheated and ate that evening).

Nicole's Chilly February Chili

Ingredients 

• 4 quart slow cooker 
• 10-15 frozen whole paste tomatoes (e.g. Roma, San Marzano, Amish Paste) thawed for 1-2 hours
• 3 small onions
• 2 or so cloves of garlic
• ~3/4 cup frozen, slices hot banana peppers
• ~1/2 cup frozen corn kernels
• 1 cup dried black beans 
• 2-3 generous pinches of dried basil
• 2-3 teaspoons of chili powder
• Salt and pepper to taste
• ~3 cups vegetable stock (Frugality tip: buy a jar of bouillon and make the stock yourself with hot water! Also saves on packaging and transportation cost due to bulkiness of prepared stock.)

- When outsides are relatively soft, puree tomatoes in food processor or blender. Add to slow cooker.

- Chop onions in food processor (or by hand). Do the same with the garlic. Add both to slow cooker.

- Add peppers, corn, black beans, basil, chili powder, salt, pepper, and stock to slow cooker.

- Set on low. Allow to cook for about 10 hours. Before turning off, check doneness of black beans. 

- Serve hot and topped with shredded cheddar, chopped onions, parsley, and sour cream. Also delicious with a slice of cornbread or thickly-sliced, toasted multigrain.

A Garden Tool for Picky Planners

I've always been a visual person as well as a particular person. For the most part, this has worked out okay for me... except when it comes to computer-based garden planning tools. Though I've not done extensive searching, the tools I have played with I didn't like because either a) they didn't allow me to customize in the ways I wanted or b) they allowed customization, but had such a steep learning curve that I defaulted to drawing the darn image by hand.

Well, call it progress, but I've found an application that satisfies even me, the pickiest of the picky when it comes to important things like the planning stage of a vegetable garden. And, the best part is, it's totally free and super informative, offering a lot of useful information about the plants selected for the plan. Another potentially valuable feature is the array of "pre-fab" gardens  which are both convenient for those not looking to design their own and can be sources of inspiration to the rest.

Provided by Gardener's Supply Company, you can find the tool here. 

One caveat: the application is really intended for square foot gardening, an effective (and efficient) method used by many with limited space available for planting vegetables. For those with more room (like me), it's still a great tool; you'll just need to adjust the recommended spacing according to your own parameters.

For today, I'll conclude with an image of what I've come up with thus far for my own garden (e.g. lots of "preservables" - tomatoes, cabbage, beans, peas, peppers, corn, and squash). It's a work in progress, but gardens always are.

2011 Project Grow Garden Plan (draft)

Where Fermentation Meets (Online) Forums

Last September, with twenty or so pounds of cabbage fresh-picked from the garden sitting on my kitchen counter, I opened the Ball Blue Book of Preserving (one of the few absolutely essential tools for anyone even thinking about preserving their own food). Though this was my first foray into vegetable fermentation, I had canned things before - dilly beans (p. 54) and whole pears in syrup (p. 20), to zesty salsa (p. 80) and seasoned tomato sauce (p. 23) - so I wasn't really expecting any surprises. Then, I opened to page forty-six and saw the following:

Sauerkraut

Ingredients:

• 20 pounds of cabbage
• 3/4 cup canning salt

... and that was it. A vinegar lover myself, I actually couldn't believe that the rich sour taste I'd enjoyed in several varieties of store-bought sauerkraut was truly the product of only these two simple ingredients. It wasn't possible, right?

So like any good child born after 1985, I indulged my skepticism by going straight to the best source of popular commentary on all things great and small: Google. Typing in something along the lines of sauerkraut ingredients, I found a plethora of blogs, forums, and chat groups who had covered this very concern. After a quick scan of a few separate pages (you've got to be sure to cross-reference sources), the issue was resolved. According to overwhelmingly popular opinion, sauerkraut is the product of cabbage, salt, and time.

3-gallon pickling crock

Despite my minor technological detour, I was soon back in the kitchen. Following the recipe, I shredded cabbage, wilting it in batches with a couple of tablespoons of salt, then firmly packing it into my 3-gallon Ohio Stoneware Crock (purchased at Downtown Home and Garden in Ann Arbor, MI - an inspiring small, local business with everything you need to be both self-reliant and surprisingly gourmet). Once I could fit not even an ounce more into the crock, I covered the now juicy mixture with a wooden sauerkraut board, some cheesecloth and set it in a disposable aluminum turkey pan on my counter (note: this type of salt brine will take the finish off most things, including my counter tops, thus the turkey pan).   

That was it. No cooking. No boiling. Now all there was to do was wait three weeks, occasionally scraping a totally normal but no less slimy layer of scum off the top. That's the interestingly satisfying thing about sauerkraut. Walking by it everyday, you can smell the vegetable rotting taking place making it hard to imagine that anything even remotely edible, much less delicious, is going to come out of that immensely heavy object emitting indecent odors and hogging all of the counter top space. And then, before you know it, it's ready. Making about 9 quart-sized canning jars of the stuff and tasting fresher and crisper than store bought varieties, you've successfully engaged in a very old form of food preservation by way of fermentation.

Kinda neat, aye?

We liked our first batch of sauerkraut so much (I'd sneak spoonfuls by night when Josh was in the other room) that in early December we went to the Farmers' Market with the mission of finding some of the season's last cabbages to make another batch. Find them we did, though this batch came out with an almost sweet taste  that neither Josh nor I is nearly as fond of (now I'm sneaking it into Josh's sandwiches and conveniently forgetting to put it on mine). I followed an identical process to the first batch, so the explanation that I've come up with for the difference in flavor is that frost had something to do with it. Some suggest that certain hardier vegetables be harvested after a hard frost since something about this kind of cold actually improves the taste (e.g. horseradish, brussel sprouts). These cabbages were certainly picked after a hard frost, so my admittedly imperfect theory is that this explains the fundamental taste difference.

However, because even I am not entirely convinced of this explanation (another Google search - this time for "sweet sauerkraut frost" - returned no satisfaction), I am working hard this season to find a good sauerkraut variety of cabbage since we plan to commit a sizable piece of our plot to it (about 66 square feet, twenty or so plants).

One variety we will be planting (mostly because I already have the seeds) is simply called Late/Storage green cabbage (from Johnny Select Seeds).To hedge our bets, I've been doing yet more online forum perusing, and the consensus seems to be that late varieties are better, and among them Dutch Flathead is the best.

Though many criticize the unreliable nature of truly free and democratic knowledge bases (like the internet and, specifically, Wikipedia), I have both built confidence and taken comfort through the resources provided by open social forum. The confidence part is pretty straightforward: with the ability to do a quick double-check of the procedure, I am more willing and eager to try something new, knowing with relative certainty (or so I tell myself) that my time, energy, and precious harvest of cabbage will not be wasted through some simply avoided misstep of mine. The comfort part is a bit more complex but, essentially, I feel better knowing that others have the same or similar questions as I have, knowing that there is a network of novices who, like me, rely on others' tales of their successful (and failed) experiments to help inform my own.

I think I've come to see that a large part of why I'm doing this online in narrative form as opposed to in a spreadsheet on my personal computer, is that I want to contribute my own small pearls of knowledge, hard gathered through ample trial and error. I am constantly working towards crafting a lifestyle that is less dependent on things and resources that are too often taken as fact and not as the conveniences they are. And almost ironically, in this process, the need for a community of people engaged in similar pursuits, for a certain type of communal wisdom becomes more apparent than ever.

So, with that, I'll conclude with the wish that when life gives us cabbages, may we always be able to make sauerkraut.

The Perfect Time to Plan a Garden

Since I arrived at work on Monday morning, a good portion of my short hallway conversations have centered on the imminent "snowpocalypse" currently rushing towards the Midwest. The threat of twelve plus inches of snow, power outages, frozen (and burst) pipes, practically impossible travel, temperatures that make the mid-thirties look surprisingly pleasant... for me, this means it's time to plan a vegetable garden.

Summer of 2011 will be my husband, Josh (bound to be a recurring character), and my fourth year as members of Project Grow Community Gardens, a local non-profit that supports access to organic gardening by renting plots to people all over Ann Arbor. Each summer, we start start with 750 square feet of dirt. In go some seeds, a little bit of water, a lot of time, some worry (mostly by me), and out come vegetables. Lots of them.

You see, when we started this adventure in 2008, we thought it was that simple, the whole seeds + water + sun = vegetables idea. I suppose in many ways it is. But, then again, it's also not. At the risk of scaring away potential readers by sounding like a crazy hippie, like so many other things in life, the process means so much more than its product.

I struggle to explain exactly what happened when we started to put time, energy, and thought into how food came to be, but suffice to say that local, community, and healthy are now concepts at the very core of our ideals and value system. And it's not just about environmentalism. It's about political action. And the economy. And our neighbors. And healthcare. And living to be 102 years old. It's about all of these things at once and yet, at the end of the day, at the center of our interwoven and at times problematic localized, community-based, but self-sufficient ideological structure is...

... a garden.

And that's where we'll start.

When I began gardening, I didn't know anything and so I felt - needless to say - more than slightly overwhelmed by all the variables and varieties involved. With more experience (and some neurotic note-taking) I feel more confident and so I want to share my process, the successes and the failures, from the planning stages of this year's garden to starting its seeds (hopefully not giving them heat stroke like last year) to planting and harvesting. As always, I look forward to the process and new this year, I look forward to sharing it with the world (or just my mom who has to follow because, well, she's my mother).

Josh and a handful of green beans from our first garden (2008)