Food Preservation: Do or Die

As part of my Backyard Nest Egg project, I’m back to canning. It’s interesting to me how I’ve come full circle. In the early years of our marriage, three decades ago, I started my first garden and learned water bath canning, in part, to save money. Now, although we’re financially much better off, I’m back to gardening and canning, partly in response to current economic conditions.

I got started canning back in the early 1980s with the help of my friend Pam. Recently divorced from an Army sergeant, Pam was my age, and like me, had a preschool-aged son. Pam refused to get a job before her son was old enough to go to school full-time, so she went on welfare and found other ways to make ends meet. (It probably wouldn’t have made economic sense for her to go out to work anyway. At that time, neither of us had any education beyond high school. Her low wages would have been eaten up by daycare expenses.)

Pam’s dad kept a huge vegetable garden, and in exchange for a share of the produce for herself and her son, Pam did all the canning and preserving. A resourceful woman who grew up in Tacoma, Washington, where we lived at the time, she knew - and taught me - where to pick wild blackberries, apples, and pears from abandoned orchards. We made pies and canned jam and applesauce for our little boys.

From that beginning, I expanded my repertoire to include strawberry jam and tomatoes from my garden. After a few years, however, life got busier; between work and college, I had less time for food production, and besides, we had a little more money. Why go to all the trouble to grow or forage food and preserve it? We had moved up, we thought.

Fast forward to last summer and the start of my Backyard Nest Egg project. I bought a pressure canner and canned pizza sauce made from tomatoes and basil I grew myself. We savored pizza made with that sauce all winter. The aroma when I opened a jar was amazing – nothing like any of the commercially prepared sauces I’d bought over the years. So it was a worthwhile project, even though it was a lot of work.

Moreover, it required saving up enough tomatoes for a batch. This can be a challenge with a backyard plot. Many traditional canning recipes call for large quantities of produce that a home gardener will not have all at one time. I got around that last year by blanching, peeling, and freezing my paste tomatoes whole, as they ripened, until I had enough for a batch of sauce.

So this year I was thrilled to find a book (now added to my “essential reading” list) perfect for the Backyard Nest Egg project – The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard. This book is full of creative and original recipes, including jams and other fruit preserves, salsas, tomato sauces, pickles and relishes – all requiring small quantities of fresh produce and only a water bath canner for processing.

The recipes are less exotic (and more numerous) than those in Eugenia Bone’s book Well-Preserved: Recipes and Techniques for Putting Up Small Batches of Seasonal Foods, but more sophisticated than the traditional Ball Blue Book recipes. For example, their salsa recipes include Papaya Mango salsa, Fresh Tomato and Black Olive salsa, and Roasted Corn and Sweet Pepper salsa. In addition to a recipe for apple butter, they also have recipes for nontraditional fruit butters, like Apricot Honey Butter and Cranberry Maple Butter. (I made the latter last week – it was marvelous; slightly tart, and the hint of maple intensifies the flavor of the cranberries).

The small batch recipes are great not just because I have limited fresh produce at one time, but also because they allow for greater variety. Back when I was making the Ball Blue book jam recipes, I’d end up with 10 half pints of strawberry jam. Unless you’re preserving for a large family, who needs that much of one type of jam? I expect to get raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries from my garden next year. A few small jars of jam from each of these would be perfect for us.

Of course, despite having found such a terrific resource, I had to make things harder for myself. The problem with me and canning is that safe food preservation requires fairly strict adherence to a tested recipe. I love to cook, but I tend to use recipes mostly as "suggestions," or jumping off points for my own creativity. If you get creative in food preservation, you have to keep within certain guidelines.

Some authorities forbid creativity in food preservation altogether, as does the food science professor at our university extension. Last April, I attended a talk she gave via teleconference for master gardeners on food preservation. She stressed that we should use only tested recipes on the university website, or Ball Blue Book recipes, and her mantra (repeated numerous times) throughout the talk was “We don’t want you getting creative!”

More than a few of us were a bit irritated by this. Why go to all the trouble of growing and preserving your own food if you can’t prepare family favorites? Or have the fun of experimenting with your own recipes? The woman sitting next to me frowned, arms crossed, and shifted in her seat. She confided to me that she wanted to try making different fruit preserves with maple syrup, rather than refined sugar.

I commiserated; I was dismayed by the salsa recipes. They hardly contained enough chilies to accurately be labeled “salsa,” in my opinion. For example, one recipe called for 8 quarts of chopped tomatoes and just four jalapeños and four “long green chilies” (huh? Is she referring to Anaheims here, or what?) I use that many chilies with two or three cups of chopped tomatoes in a fresh salsa.

I emailed this professor later to ask for advice on adapting recipes. I wrote that her salsa recipes were “awfully low” on chilies; how might I safely add more? I also asked:

Is there a way of determining the pH of a food product to find out whether the acid content is high enough for safe water bath canning? For example, can pH paper be used? Alternatively, can you give a ratio of acid (vinegar, lemon juice) to low acid vegetables (e.g, ___ cups) that will produce a safe product
for water bath canning?

She replied that she could not give such a “formula” and that:

There isn't a way to test pH that will work. That said, you can always substitute hot chili peppers for green peppers, celery, onion or other low-acid ingredient in salsa (not tomatoes, however).

She added her usual warning:

If you are a creative cook, this would indeed not be welcome news, however, to do things incorrectly puts the health of you and your family at risk.

This irritated me again, perhaps unreasonably. Obviously, we attended the food preservation talk, and I asked her advice via email, because we wanted to safely preserve food. Repeated warnings about risks to our families had the feel of trying to put the fear of God into children to induce unquestioning obedience.

Moreover, although she stressed science for safety, the measures in her recipes do not seem scientifically reliable to me. How much is a cup of chopped onion, for example? Doesn’t that depend on how finely or coarsely you chop it? (Yesterday, I actually found online a University of Georgia paper with guidelines for safe ratios of tomatoes to low acid vegetables for salsa by weight, which makes more sense to me.) She presents a conversion chart on her website for chilies that equates one medium jalapeño to “about” one quarter cup chopped chili. I don’t know where she gets her jalapeños, or what “medium” means to her, but I’ve never managed to come up with more than about 2 tablespoons of chopped produce from one jalapeño.

I finally selected a recipe from Small Batch Preserving, but even those recipes use fewer chilies than I would prefer. And, they also use variable measurements; for example “2-4 jalapeños,” no size (medium? large?) given. So I set about carefully making substitutions. By our food science professor’s calculation, 4 jalapeños, the max allowed in the Small Batch Preserving recipe, would amount to a cup of chopped chilies. So I measured out a cup of chopped chilies. This required eight chilies; four jalapeños, and four Anaheims. I didn’t chop them finely, either. I made no other changes to the recipe.

I prepared the recipe and canned it. There was some left over, not enough to fill a jar, so we ate it that day. It was terrific, with the right amount of heat and a wonderful sweet aftertaste from the orange juice. I thought the vegetables would be mushy from the pre-cooking and processing, but they were perfect.

However, our food science professor had done her job well. I’m now afraid to serve the canned product, lest I murder my family. I emailed our professor once again to ask:

Can you recommend a company in Wisconsin where I can send home-canned product to test for safety of the recipe? Thanks.

She replied:

It would be helpful if I knew a bit more.... Are you canning food for sale and need a recipe approved?

Or are you canning food for your home use?

I emailed back that it was for home use. Her blunt response:

The approved recipes for homes are either in
the Ball Blue book or from the National Center for Home Food Preservation:

www.uga.edu/nchfp/

We don't recommend anything else for home canning.

That’s it. Nothing more. I can’t tell you how angry this made me. It also clarified for me that this was, at least in part, about control, not just food safety. I can understand not being able to give formulas, and the problems with pH testing, although I had to research that myself to find out why. (Turns out the pH of the finished product is affected not just by the acidity of the ingredients, but also the density, which we cannot measure at home. No explanations were forthcoming from the good professor; just rules that we are expected to blindly follow, else someone might die.) But I can’t understand the refusal to recommend a food testing lab to someone who is trying to ensure safe food preservation.

Surfing the net, I learned I was not the only one with this problem. I found a great thread discussing safe salsa recipes for canning and the difficulty of getting someone to test recipes. One guy reported that a lab he contacted directed him to the local public health department, which, in turn, refused to test anything unless someone had already sickened or died! Others had been able to get their local university extensions to test their recipes. (Lucky them – they’re not dependent on U of WI.)

I’ve found a lab locally, but they haven’t replied to my email. I'll pester them by telephone this week, and, inspired by the experiences of others I’ve read online, not stop until I find someone to test my recipe. Meanwhile, I plan to goose-step on into the kitchen and rigidly follow a recipe from Small Batch Preserving when I can pizza sauce this afternoon.

Backyard Herbal

In my successes post, I wondered whether it would be “cheating” to include herbs because I've had more experience growing them than any other type of plant, and because they are fairly easy to grow (sure bets, in other words). Later I realized I shouldn’t downplay herbs. They are essential to a Backyard Nest Egg due to their multiple contributions: culinary, nutritive, and medicinal.

As everyone knows, herbs can improve the humblest of fare. Today, for example, we’re having meatloaf and potatoes. Ho-hum. But the meatloaf is a Bobby Flay recipe that incorporates lots of finely chopped, sautéed veggies, as well as fresh thyme and parsley. The potatoes are our own homegrown German butterballs, roasted with olive oil and rosemary. Suddenly, our simple menu sounds like something a waiter in one of the better restaurants could wax eloquent about when taking your order.

Rosemary and thyme are among my favorite herbs for cooking. Thyme improves any beef dish and enhances just about any vegetable dish as well. Rosemary is a marvelous addition to many dishes, especially poultry, lamb, and potatoes. I also love rosemary baked into a hearty bread. These woody perennials are easy to grow and dry, and I’ve never had a problem with rabbits going after them!

However, here in Wisconsin, it’s impossible to overwinter rosemary outdoors, whereas thyme will survive as a perennial. If Thanksgiving doesn’t fall too late in November, and we haven’t had extremely cold weather yet, I still have fresh springs of rosemary, sage, and thyme for stuffing the turkey (together with onion and lemon – I bake the bread stuffing separately.) But that’s the absolute latest in the year I can hope for fresh rosemary from the garden.

Rosemary also takes a bit of time to get going in the spring. So my practice now is to plant one rosemary and one thyme seedling in pots in the spring. At the end of the summer, I bring the pots in. They don’t grow much, so I can only snip limited quantities of the fresh herbs over the winter. But in spring, I have a good-sized rosemary plant with an established root system. I plant it in the garden, together with several small purchased rosemary seedlings. The overwintered plant has a head start, so I get more fresh rosemary earlier. At the same time, I plant another small seedling in a pot, to take inside during the following winter, and provide a larger plant for the garden next spring.

I’ve only recently started thinking about the nutritive value of herbs. I was astonished to learn that parsley contains twice the iron of spinach and three times the vitamin C of oranges (by weight)! Parsley is definitely worth growing for those reasons alone. Parsley also enhances the flavor of many dishes, and complements other herbs as well.

Grown from seed, parsley is an herb that teaches patience and faith. Germination is slow, and no matter how I try to manage the seedlings, they are leggy and limp by the time I plant them out. They (and cilantro) look like the weak sisters of the herb garden, and it seems hard to believe you’ll get much out of them. But soon, parsley seedlings take off and produce lush, abundant foliage.

Before supermarkets shipped in out-of-season produce from distant locales, people in northern climates eagerly sought the first greens of spring for their nutritive properties. Chives are an easy-to-grow and versatile source of early greens in spring for the Backyard Nest Egg. Chives can survive the harsh winters of Wisconsin and are the first herb in my garden to send up green shoots in the spring. Chopped fresh chives are a great finish to many types of dishes – including soups, salads, and cooked vegetables.

Finally, as we all know, herbs have long been valued for their medicinal uses. In fact, it’s likely that some herbs, such as rosemary, thyme, and parsley, became popular culinary herbs because of their medicinal properties. Historically and today, rosemary, thyme, and parsley are considered beneficial as digestives and carminatives (a carminative is something that relieves flatulence). Rodale’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs identifies rosemary as a liver and gall bladder stimulant, and thyme as a liver tonic, while Michael Tierra (The Way of Herbs) describes thyme as an important parasiticide, useful for treating intestinal worms. (Contemporary research indicates that rosemary and parsley also have antioxidant properties.)

One of my goals for my Backyard Nest Egg is to expand my knowledge and use of homegrown herbs for medicinal purposes. I have used some simple preparations for minor complaints for years. For example, I always dry lots of sage for use in treating congestion in the head or chest in winter. Basically, I throw a handful of dried sage in a bowl of just boiled water and take in the steam with a towel over my head. (Rosemary is also a great expectorant and decongestant, but sage is more abundant in my garden and I find a little goes a long way in cooking. So I use the sage for colds and save the rosemary for cooking.) I find both peppermint and parsley tea refreshing and good digestive aids, and parsley to be a useful diuretic.

Other herbs take more time and effort to process. Echinacea is one of my favorite native flowers and I’ve grown it for years, when I lived in Nebraska and here in Wisconsin. But for medicinal purposes, I always use commercially produced preparations. I want to learn how to dig and process the root myself. Next year I plan to add Black Cohosh, another native plant to my garden. Like Echinacea, the root is the part used for medicinal purposes.

But our first experiment with processing root will be horseradish. (An upcoming post will focus exclusively on this herb.) Rick loves horseradish as a condiment and suggested we add it to the garden last year. The root is harvested the second year, so in a few weeks we’ll be digging it up. It got so big last year, we had to move it out of my backdoor herb garden to it's own place of honor in the larger garden. We must have left a piece of root, because as you can see in the photo above, there is a small horseradish still in the herb garden. Medicinally, as anyone who has eaten it knows, horseradish is great for clearing sinus congestion.

As food and medicine, for pleasure and health, the herb garden is obviously essential for any Backyard Nest Egg.

The Chickens Have Landed

I’m not a “pet person.” I’ve never had a pet and never wanted one. It’s not that I hate animals; I was just never interested. I don’t go all gaga over baby animals. I’ve never felt the urge to pet a gorgeous cat or play with an adorable dog. I’m blessed (or cursed, depending on the situation) with a very strong sense of smell. I can smell odors from a distance that others have to get up close to smell. So animals often offend my olfactory senses.

I’m also a fairly fastidious person, at least about some things, so I feel squeamish about the practices of some pet owners, especially when it comes to food. I’m sure I irritated my sister-in-law Cara, at least a little, by shrieking for someone to get the dog out of the kitchen when my brother Jess and I were cooking. I’ve also been known to wrinkle my nose when my sister Teresa’s son Jeremy takes his pet rodent out of its cage to play with it. (Is it a guinea pig? A ferret? A rat? I can’t remember.)

So when I announced that I was thinking of getting chickens, I’m sure my relatives thought I was delusional; that it would either never happen, or wouldn’t last long. “I just can’t see you with chickens,” my sister Donna remarked mildly. I’m sure the others expressed stronger opinions among themselves. Our then 13-year-old grandson Nathan couldn’t stop laughing. My husband Rick acted like it was a bad joke, and I played it that way for awhile, pretending it was just a ploy to annoy him.

Why in the world did think I wanted chickens? I blame filmmakers Tashai Lovington & Robert Lughai. I attended a screening of their film Mad City Chickens at the 2008 Wisconsin film fest. The film centers on chicken aficionados in Madison, Wisconsin, but playfully contextualizes their multiple stories in the larger historical tradition of chicken keeping. Unlike most of the other film fest screenings, this one had a party atmosphere. Many of the chicken people featured in the film were in attendance, handing out chicken buttons, literature, peeps, and one woman dressed in chicken costume handed out chocolate eggs.

Their sense of fun was contagious and the chickens were gorgeous. Clearly, the filmmakers love chickens – they photographed them so beautifully. I had no idea there were so many different kinds of chickens. My experience of chickens up to that time was of plastic film covered bloodless chunks of flesh in a supermarket. I began to wonder whether I might like to keep chickens.

They fit perfectly with my notion of a backyard nest egg. I’d been thinking about how to get a protein source in the garden, perhaps by cutting down some old maple trees to plant nut trees. I also knew that pastured chickens produce healthier eggs, with less cholesterol and saturated fat, and more omega-3 fatty acids, beta carotene, and vitamins A and E. Chickens also fit with the principle of minimizing purchased inputs by producing manure for garden. I’d also heard that they eat a lot of bugs; some people even claim their Japanese beetle problems disappeared once they got chickens.

I gave myself a year to really think it through and do my research. I read everything I could find, from message boards on websites to agricultural extension articles to poultry-raising books. I visited local coops during the 2008 Mad City Chicken Coop Tour. (Note to those in the Madison area: the 2009 tour is on August 15th). The tour allowed me to see different kinds of coops, talk to owners about chicken-keeping, and find out whether they were as smelly as some people claim. (The coops, not the owners. Turns out none were too stinky, even on a hot summer afternoon, but I’m guessing that’s partly because they cleaned the coops before the tour.)

I got my first baby chicks in May. Although I thought of them as livestock, rather than pets, I’m secretly (or maybe obviously?) growing a bit fond of them. Backyard chickens occupy a complicated border region between pets and livestock. It’s an interesting journey I’ll be detailing in future posts. Some days, when I’m scooping their poop from the coop, I’m still a little surprised to find myself here. I think about my friend Laura in Omaha gushing, “You’re living my dream!” This is some people’s dream, I remind myself. And I laugh and I laugh.

What Does My Garden Mean to Me?

There are so many layers of meaning and intent. I grow my garden as part of my program to regain my health, as an antidote to the years of graduate school that corroded my physical (and spiritual) well-being. During those years, I spent too much time sitting, thinking, reading. We have evolved to move, not to be immobile and utilize only our brains. Gardening nourishes the body by requiring time spent outside in physical labor and by providing a source of organic fruits, vegetables, and herbs.

I garden as an investment, the “greenest” investment one can make for retirement. Financial guru Catherine Austin Fitts advises “rethinking diversification” of one’s investments from the traditional portfolio, to multiple types of assets including tangible assets, such as a paid-off home and inventory of household goods; and social capital, such as mutually supportive networks of family and friends, multiple skill sets, and our physical health. She writes:

Diversification means that we invest in our physical and mental well-being. We invest our time in understanding the toxic chemicals, drugs and other influences that increasingly contribute to poor health and cause us to need so much more funding for more drugs and medical treatments to cure what ails us. One of the greatest – and growing — threats to our financial health is physical illness. The notion that corporate stock investments will create security while one saves money eating unhealthy food is contradictory to the principles of building real wealth.

My gardening “investments” include dwarf cherry trees and blueberry bushes (high in antioxidants), columnar apple trees, strawberries (higher in vitamin C than citrus fruit), perennial vegetables such as asparagus and multiplier onions, and herbs for medicinal and culinary uses.

Additionally, I invest in the land, by turning kitchen scraps and chicken manure into rich compost and by shredding every leaf in autumn from the many trees in and around our yard to create a rich mulch for the garden that will contribute to building up the soil over time.

I garden to promote our health in old age by ensuring we have access to high quality organic fruits and vegetables even on a fixed income. By the time my husband retires in 10 years, we will have a paid off home, mature fruit trees and berry bushes, established perennial vegetables, and productive soil in which to grow our annual crop of vegetables and melons.

I garden because I have learned that food will become less abundant and thus more costly in the future. Climate change has already resulted in drought in many places – such as Australia and Africa. California, where almost half of our nation’s fruit and vegetables are grown, is in its third year of a drought serious enough to have been declared a state emergency by governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. There many thousands of acres were not planted this year (2009) because farmers could not get loans without guaranteed access to water for irrigation.

I garden because fossil fuel depletion and “peak oil” means that it will become more expensive to ship food cross-country and around the world. And that the fertilizers derived from natural gas that made possible abundant harvests in depleted soil will become more expensive.

I increasingly grow heirloom vegetables and am learning to save seeds and slips as a political act of resistance to the oppression of Monsanto and other corporate interests who seek to force us all to buy seeds from them every year for sustenance, by foisting GM and terminator seed technology on us and crushing farmers who attempt to save and develop their own seeds. Of terminator seeds, which are genetically designed to be sterile after producing one season’s crop, Indian activist Vandana Shiva has said, “You really need to have a brutal mind . . . to even think in those terms. But quite clearly, the profits are so much higher” (see the documentary film, The Corporation.)

Finally, I garden now for the same reasons I began my first garden, nearly 30 years ago – the joy of watching a seed sprout, the satisfaction of harvesting food we produced ourselves, the pleasure of savoring the flavor of fresh picked produce, and the sense of peace I feel when working in the garden.