Crazy Canning

Ok, so this past year i read Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. it's all about her family's experience eating local, in-season foods from their garden and regional farmers. i loved and was inspired by it. call me crazy, but it seems to me like we should be willing to spend more time and money on the foods that literally sustain us than the majority of our society does. i know this is a cultural value, and we're in an economic recession, but it's also about personal priorities. i myself am one of the cheapest people of all time. 'free stuff' is my mantra and i can successfully live on a few hundred bucks for many months. BUT still, i hope that one day we'll be able to consider the taste, growing methods and location, and health-giving value of the foods we eat, in addition to how much they cost. i don't mean to place blame on people for eating cheap or imported foods, i just want to call attention to flaws in the whole food system.

pardon my rant.

so one of the things that barbara kingsolver (my hero) wrote in her book was, and i paraphrase, "it's totally acceptable to walk up to a grower at the farmer's market, say 'yo gimme all your ____ [insert name of desired fruit or veggie here]', take it home and can the crap out it". heck yes. and for some reason, while i was hoeing at a local farm and listening to the audio version of this book this spring, this notion really, as the hippies say, 'resonated' with me.

trouble was, we moved to a new bus spot in the middle of summer, didn't have a garden going, were relatively broke, i'd never canned before, and being a mild (read: extreme) hypochondriac, the idea of toxins such as botulism killing me simply because i canned salsa without enough acid was super freaky-deaky...and not in a fun way. i sucked it up though, and decided it's really important to me to have local foods in winter. and seeing as essentially all my favorite foods grow in summer and fall, i thought i'd better find a way to make barbara proud and store some foods for the months to come.

basic food storage options are, of course: freeze, dehydrate, can. we don't have a freezer. and we don't have a dehydrator. i did look into solar dehydrators, and made a simple one for drying blueberries in the middle of summer. but it took a damn long time for the berries to dry and birds ate half of them. i'll make a better dehydrator next year.

but in the meantime i got pretty excited about canning. i picked blackberries, bought some items at farmstands in rogue river and murphy and bought hella tomatoes from the grants pass grower's market. so far, i've canned 6 pints of wild blackberry jam, 9 pints of plum jam, 17 quarts of tomatoes, and 16 pints of salsa. we're also fermenting dill pickles for canning. more than anything, i'm excited about the jam because i was able to use local honey as the sweetener. mmmmmmm.

admittedly, this isn't a ton of canned-ness, and it probably won't last us very long. but i feel proud nevertheless for having tried something new that sticks with my (sometimes ridiculous) values. if you're interested, these are the recipes i used for jam, canned tomatoes, and salsa.

it's really fun to can, even in a tiny bus sized kitchen. and doesn't take as much time, energy, OR money as i was expecting. for the produce i spent:
-$60 for around 70 pounds of tomatoes
-$6 for peppers
-$3 for onions
-$10 for honey
-$10 for cucumbers
-$9 for plums
-$8 for lemon juice
-$4 for pectin
for a grand total of $110 dollars.

which is a lot, but it's also for 48 cans of food. and if we assume that 32 ounces of organic canned tomatoes from the grocery store is around 3 dollars, a pint of salsa is 4 dollars, a pint (way bigger than the normal jam jar size) of jam is 6 (and will most likely have corn syrup as the sweetener!), that adds up to a cost of 205 bucks. so really i saved 95 dollars! PLUS i know where and how the foods were grown, what's in them, and how they were preserved.

Yay canned foods!