Getting Ready for Winter
Fall is harvest time. There is something truly magical about it and I love hearing about the many ways in which people prepare for the coming cold season. Here at home we continue our path of exploring food storage and choices that we make.
I was fortunate enough to inherit a large box of pears and apples earlier this month. The apples were easy they went into small shallow boxes and in the root cellar. I was then posed with the daunting task of what the heck to do with 50+ lbs of pears! I cold packed and canned half of them, dehydrated half of what was left and the rest we ate. We must have eaten at least one or two pears a day for two weeks. There are still pears in my fridge that I have been told to make pear sauce with. Oh yeah pear sauce is really really good.
Urs Bauman of Quail’s Farm has been so kind as to supply my flour for years now. Fall is when I buy it and the night before I pick it up is when he grinds the grains. I purchase 10kg bags of rye, spelt and wheat flour and then store them in large rubbermaid bins, in my cellar.
What I am interested in sourcing locally is nuts and seeds. Being vegetarians we eat a lot of these and so finding a local source would be beautiful. Currently we order them bulk through a wholesale food order that gets put in twice a year. They get stored in the freezer.
Frost hit rather suddenly this year and I know that a few farmers were hit somewhat unexpectedly which resulted in loss of crops. I remember a recent cold market morning chatting with growers who frantically picked the last of their produce late the day before and what they could salvage that morning.
One thing we’ve loved in exploring food storage is how it is bringing us in touch with where our food comes from. We are also discovering how ‘convenient’ our world has become in such a short time, how we are about to lose an entire generation of knowledge regarding food storage and household husbandry skills that our grandparents took for granted. It makes me thankful that I have had the realization to bring it back so that I might pass it along to my children maybe even living to see a shift in how we all think about food.
