....with the moon and the stars and the sun. Well, it is August; Canning season. That means two things in our household: 1) the kitchen (and sometimes the house) will never really be completely clean or un-sticky, and 2) there are never, ever enough jars. We need to take our stock in Ball, because the local canning supply store already knows us on sight.

Much of our canning this year has been a bit experimental as we don't really know what it is we are going to love and what we are going to want to change next year. A few things have become quite apparent right away. We will definitely be picking more blueberries and strawberries to can into preserves rather than just yogurt and ice-cream mix-ins. However, two items have become instant hits: peaches and corn. These two are definitely keepers! Not only are they fabulous canned up, they were relatively cheap and easy to can.

At this point, any people with whom we knew before the simplicity move deem us crazy. I can't say that I blame them. When you walk into a house and have to ask, "Is that a garbage can full of corn in the living room?" you tend to believe your friends have gone off the deep end. However, there really aren't very many good ways to get eighty or ninety ears of corn home from the grocery store (where it was on sale) without using the giant garbage can you just purchased at Home Depot.

Telling my coworkers I couldn't have a round with them after work because I needed to go home elicited the question of "Why?" My excited response "Jules and I are going to shuck corn!" isn't exactly the most normal after-work past time. My father was also a bit disheartened when he came to pick up his grandson and the Spicy Barracuda pouted, "I don't want to go, I want to say and shuck the corn." But honestly, it was all quite a bit of fun! We all sat around the living room coffee table yanking the husks off and throwing them in brown grocery bags to be hauled out to the compost bin. We slowly stacked all the ears in large Tupperware containers to be boiled up over the next couple of days. We laughed along and got silks stuck to us, marveling on how much corn we had and how we might have over purchased just a bit. Jules and I will forever have fond memories of the grocery store man's shock at the idea of us purchasing eighty some ears of corn. "Are you serious?!" he declared and led us into the back of the store because he wasn't going to bring that much all out to us.

At a quarter a piece our yearly allotment of corn cost us 20 dollars and we can recycle the jars over and over. Considering that a can of corn from the grocery store is about a dollar and contained close to half as much as one of our jars, the math worked out and we should have been fine. All stacked up, however, it seemed like quite a bit! (Next year we are going to go to U-Pick because they are six for a dollar!)
Once shucked, it was off into the boiling water. This is the reason you leave the long stems on the corn. They are wonderful handles! I was able to place fifteen ears of corn up on end in my gynormous stock pot. I filled it up with water once they were all in and cranked the stove up to high. The corn was boiled for only three to five minutes. This was basically enough time for it to turn brilliant yellow, but not be fully cooked. Since corn is low acid enough to require pressure canning, you don't want to cook it all the way through. The canner will do the rest and still leave the consistency nice and firm. Much more cooking and your corn will be really mushy when you take it out of the can for dinner.

Out came the casserole dish and the knife because it was time to start kerneling. Using a non-serrated knife and a bit of a sawing motion, cut the kernels off the cob about three quarters of the way through. You don't want to scrape the cobs or cut the kernels so low that you get any bits of cob into your jars. The cob won't soften up and you will have a very nice crunchy chunk in your corn. Eww! Later, we stumbled onto a great tool in the canning section of the store which kernals the corn for you! With handles on the sides and a sharpened metal circle in the middle you slide it down the shaft of corn and it does all the work for you. No sawing, slipping, or rotating necessary. It was only four dollars and awesome; next year it will go much faster. This kitchen gadget is completely unnecessary, however, the knife worked just fine.

I could kernel about three cobs before the pile became too large. A 1/2 cup measure was just perfect to fill my wide-mouth quart jars, and then to put 1-1/2 cups of hot corn-water on top. They were processed for 85 minutes at 11lbs of pressure. (For pints, process for 55 minutes at the same pressure.)

Then it was off to the local canning supply for more quarts because we soon realized that it takes about four ears of corn to fill one quart and we dramatically under purchased. The kernels look so small you would think that so many would fit in one large jar, but alas, not the case. In total, I did all eighty ears in two different sessions over two days. Leaving the husked corn out for a day didn't do much at all to dry it out. More than a day of drying and I might be a little worried the flavor might be effected due to sugar to starch conversion. We yielded 23 quarts of corn total leaving us at just under a dollar a quart. No sodium, no high-fructose corn syrup, and way better tasting!

Work, to many in our society, is a four letter word. It is dirty, exhausting, and something to be avoided at most any cost. In many respects, the idea pushed to children is that you put in your time so that in the end you won't have to work anymore. You either study your way out of it with college and a larger salary, or you labor your way out of it in a job you dislike so that you can retire. Things like chopping wood, culturing milk, or hanging wash are directly worse than flipping on the furnace, buying dairy products at Walmart, and using the dryer. Somehow, it has become that the idea of many activities I now participate in most every week are thought of to be gruelingly laborious. The funniest part of all this is that when I ask many of the people who voice these concerns to me, they have never participated in anything other than furnace switches, store bought food, and dryers. "So how would you know?" is my first thought, though I don't say it.

The fact is, turning on the furnace is much easier than chopping and splitting wood. However, I would like to argue it isn't simpler. I have no idea how my furnace works. I wouldn't have a clue how to fix it and legally cannot fix many of the processes that go into getting the power to my furnace. However, the schematics I have seen and the small amount which has been explained to me clearly shows that the steps of creating the electricity (hydro power here), storing the electricity, wiring it to my house, then the furnace, and finally somehow conducting it into heat is not simple. In fact, it is incredibly diverse and complicated. Now, the person who just has to flip that switch may never know any of the background of how their house magically becomes warm (never did), but ignorance does not make something simple.

I know how a tree grows. I know how it stores its electricity in the form of densely laid carbon molecules. I know the difference between a ceder, a hemlock, and a Douglas fir; why they burn differently; and what conditions they need to grow. Part of this is because I am/was and environmental studies major, but much of it is also because I participate in the process of these cycles and the natural systems of their creation, destruction, and the succession which follows. This is in no way easy (though it really isn't as hard as many seem to think), but it is incredibly simple.

The last time Jules and I went to go chop wood, he pointed out the immense sense of personal connection which comes from knowing where our wood came from. We have seen the home the tree once had which will heat our spaces this winter. We have intimate contact with the life it once lived and thus a reverence for all it will give us to continue our lives.

The garden is very similar. There is no commercial production filled with large industrial equipment, no pesticide or chemical development which had to go into our food. There is no way I could begin to describe the chemical complexity of pesticide or what it does to the soil structure and the biogeochemistry of a watershed. Not to mention the multitude of high-tech gadgetry which now constitutes large scale farming. Our garden is literally as simple as seed, soil, and water. By creating and spreading our own compost we are reminded of our waste in ways we won't see for many years with pesticide production. We have collected the rain water, transferred, harvested, and dispersed it even as it fell from the sky all over us. We planted the seeds, watched their development, and have begun collecting the seed to have the cycle come full circle. Yes, it means more labor from building boxes, hand planting, weeding, and such, but it also means I know everything that goes into my food. It is simply food.

When I watch our sour cream and cottage cheese culture, or our butter transform from cream, I am personally taking part in the processes of our food. There are no industrial food plants, no long transportation stops from one venue to the next, no commercial advertising and packaging steps involved. It is as simple as the dairy products which go into it.

So many of these thoughts have been culminating in not only my brain, but also Jules'. It wasn't until our recent trip to Georgia that many of them found the common ground to all fit cohesively together. Jules' long time mentor and friend, Jeff Hanson, owns The Book Nook and recommended Eric Brende's Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology. It is the story of Eric's adventure with is wife living in an Amish-style community for a year and a half.

Now we are not going anywhere near as hardcore as they were. They had no running motors, no electricity, no running water, the works. We are reasonably happy with our small scale simplicity. However, what struck me as so wonderful about the book was the way Eric described the culture of the people whom he lived with and around. Work and labor are the functions which kept the society going. The central focus of their social interactions and their community is combined labor to survive. You help your neighbors for the sheer factor that they need help and will then reciprocate the help later. This is just as much a cultural currency and nothing was expected in return for helping. "Many hands make light work," was a common saying and practice. This communal helping, communal work, made the tasks so much easier in that it provided social interactions and shared knowledge. The community was bound together by shared labor, experience, and all the interconnections which come with the two.

There were many times when reading that Jules and I found ourselves silently nodding and relating to the life Eric and his wife were sharing. We have experienced many of the same struggles, culture shock, and learning curve which they did. The largest example came just recently, however. With canning season in full swing, there was much to be done around our kitchen. As the cans all began to pile up, it became apparent we had no where left to put them. The Hole wasn't finished, and with so much time being spent canning there was not time to finish it. If we stopped the canning to finish The Hole, the short season for fruit would be over. If we didn't finish The Hole, we would have no where to place the cans from the fruit season. We were rather stuck.

Until one day I came home from work to find Jules' head poking out of The Hole, covered in dirt. Up until this point, The Hole had primarily been my task with occasional help from The Barracuda. In true supportive fashion, Jules had jump started my lack luster feelings about the work involved in finishing our root cellar. He approached the entire process in a completely different way with large scale excavation and then later finishing work. This monumental moving of dirt helped re-energize me into doing whatever finishing work needed and the hole was completed in over one long weekend. Together, the daunting task was significantly more manageable and actually kinda fun. Without us joining forces, and his different approach, The Hole still wouldn't be done.

With the dirt removed it was time for shelves and I was once again removed from The Hole, only to watch from the entrance. With such close quarters and large shelving, it would be virtually impossible for two people to have completed the task without a head wound. Being accident prone and not very visual, it would have been me with the head would. So Jules grumbled, man-handled, cursed a bit, and eventually constructed three sturdy, significant shelves for all our cans to sit through the winter.

The enormous task of moving all our cans down into the completed root cellar was more than I thought it would be, but now I don't know how we have managed without it. It will still take a bit more excavation for us to be able to store all of our bins of dry goods in the most ideal places, and still a bit more when our apple tree, pumpkins, potatoes, and carrots begin producing enough to warrant storage in containers other than cans, but for now we've completed one of the most major projects for our home. I know Jules thought I was crazy when I proposed the idea. I know my father (an architect) thought I had completely lost it when I had him come look at the space to discuss how to structurally pull it off. But, in the end, hand digging the root cellar with only a five gallon bucket or two was pretty cool.

There aren't too many great things that the Pacific Northwest can claim come from all our rain. If you grew up here, the benefits are many, but you are used to a lot of grey skies and it is just normal. However, if you are from out of town, the rain can be a bit of a complete downer. In fact, I have known more than a couple of people who needed to move due to the onset of seasonal depression from all our rain.

It makes things green. We have cheap hydroelectric power. But most of all, we have access to Hood Strawberries. Oh dear sweet Mary Mother of God, these berries are so good. You will only find them in Pacific Northwest grocery stores which sell seasonal berries because they exist for only three weeks out of the year and don't keep much more than a couple of days. They don't travel well and so they also tend to be a bit expensive. Oh, but it is worth it. There is very little in existence which says summer more than these strawberries.

We could have visited our local organics store, paid a lot more, and quickly acquired a very small little container of berries to munch on for the next couple of days. One better, there are many roadside stands advertising the onset of strawberry season with berries spread all over their tables ready for anyone to drive up and purchase. However, if there is one thing I have seen in us raising our own food, it is the importance exposing the Barracuda to the process of growing. By choosing to U-Pick your berries they are not only cheaper and you can get large volumes of berries, but you can see the farm and develop a relationship with those who grow your food. So much of the time it is forgotten that our food comes from the ground by people who work sun-up to sun-down. It is a lot of work for a reward often gone unappreciated. It is important to me that The Barracuda not miss these facts about his meals.

After packing a picnic lunch, and getting gasoline, we were on the road to the farm. The drive is gorgeous, only about 30 minutes, and a great way to build the anticipation of the event. The U-Pick farms in our area step up a tent right off of the parking lot where they sell boxes, have a weigh station, and park the large wagons used to hall everything to and from the fields. We had our 5 gallon bucket weighed by Ashley (a local farm girl) and she pointed the way to the fields. They rotate the picking every other day or so, allowing the berries to ripen and be picked evenly rather than totally annihilated. You are rarely in the same field twice in one week.

The Barracuda hopped into a wagon with our bucket and I began to pull us up the dirt road, past the herb garden, and through the peach orchard, to rows upon rows of strawberry plants. The romance of such a walk surpasses the mere 5 minutes it takes to get there. You would never know we were only thirty minutes from the city. Life here is just plain slower. The jobs require more time, harder work, and a level of patience which slows the pace of life. As a city dweller, the Barracuda wouldn't know such a world exists without our excursions. I would like him to realize other people fully live the type of life we are allowed to have small portions of with our lifestyle.

Jules and I have often wondered just how weird our undertaking in simplicity is. When the Barracuda and I got within view of the strawberry fields it was very obvious our family is not alone. The fields were full of people. Families, moms, kids of all ages, and even grandparents were out picking in groups with their own picnic lunches. These were all homeschooling families (school is still in for another week and it was noon on Friday) who were out picking to make jam, can, and generally have a desire to experience the slower pace of life much like our family has. It was a welcome relief for the Barracuda to see other kids doing the same things we were and much fun was to be had among all the children.
Picking your own berries requires that reminder of patience, of a slower pace, of harder work. It is a very simple task, but one to enjoy the rambling up and down strawberry rows taking in all the farm environment has to offer. This means you will get dirty hands, bitten by bugs, and if you are not careful a sun burn. It also means you will get to hear your child amazed at how berries can go from green to purple in the course of their lives. The Barracuda could see the pollination we had talked about for his homeschooling first hand in the progression of the berries. I was able to talk to other moms who let their children roam the fields as I did enjoying being outside on a great day. (The fields are open and flat so kids have to go quite a ways to be out of sight and ear shot.) We were all enjoying a Friday afternoon in the sun, with our families, taking part in the season. The Barracuda picked berries with me, as did most all the other children. There were people with colanders, Tupperware, cardboard boxes, and bowls all there to enjoy the season in our little chunk of the world. It was quite refreshing.

With our five gallon bucket filled half-way, our hands and knees very dirty, and our stomachs rumbling we trekked back to the weigh station to pay for our harvest . By having our bucket weighed first when empty that amount is recorded with masking tape on the side of the bucket and then subtracted from the end weight. This way we only pay for the berries and not the extra 2.25 pounds of bucket. We stood in line, paid, and then ventured off into the peach orchard for a picnic lunch of tree climbing and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.











The afternoon passed quickly and soon we were home to get cleaned up and can our wonderful bucket of bounty!

After washing the berries, the Barracuda capped and sliced them while I cleaned up the kitchen and prepared the cans. He is getting so good with both his axe handling and his knife skills that I hardly have to watch him anymore. This has helped significantly with getting things around the house done. He can be set to one chore (taking in the wash, preparing food to can, making kindling, cleaning the yard before mowing, his schoolwork) and I can take on an entirely different task within the same vicinity knowing I won't have to constantly observe and mediate. By the time he was done slicing, strawberries were all over his hands, his legs, his right eyebrow, his left cheek, and a bit mushed into his hair. Upon further inspection both elbows and his neck also has been christened with bright red juice. He was just plain sticky, dirty, and quite tasty according to Guadalupe who wouldn't stop licking him all over. So the strawberries went into a saucepan with 1/2 cup of sugar and the Barracuda went into the bathtub.

All in all 8 and 1/2 pounds of berries yielded 3 full quarts of berries. Previous 8 1/2 pound batches have given us 9 pints of berries and syrup. Both are processed at 6 pounds of pressure for eight minutes. With another couple of trips we will be well set up for the winter and be able to enjoy our three weeks of deliciousness all year round.

Jules will come out with us next time as the school year finally winds down and he is free (Only one more week! Not that I am counting). Over the summer we will be back to the farms for blueberries, blackberries, peaches, pears, and corn. We can all enjoy the whimsy of watching our food go from plants to our table and slowly creating family food traditions which will hopefully last all the way through much eye rolling and personal teenage embarrassment from the Barracuda. Little does he know how much the girls will enjoy strawberry picking dates, harvest festivals, and corn mazes!

When the idea of getting a canner really looked like it was going to happen, we sat down and made a list of all the things we wanted to can so that we could get an idea of how much space would be necessary and what all we would need to acquire for the canning. One of the things on that list was bananas. So I hit the internet and began looking for how you go about canning bananas. There is very little out there. In fact there was so little that I had to call my local agricultural extension to ask questions about why different agricultural extensions claimed different things. According to the lady who called me back, the funding for testing the canning of bananas isn't as important and spending the funding to can something more "normal." As such different university extension programs might have different ideas about the safest way to can the product. Well, that made some sense. She referred me to the University of Georgia. This is apparently the mecca for anyone interested in home preservation.

As far as I now know, there are two ways to can bananas: puree and chunked. The only thing that everyone seemed to agree with is that you cannot process bananas with water bath canning. A pressure cooker is necessary because they have virtually no acidity.

Chunked
The University of Minnesota recommends cubing and canning just like you would pumpkin. This is due to their belief that straight pureed banana is too thick to insure the center of the jar has reached the appropriate temperature. So you cut it into one inch chunks, boil it in water for 2 minutes and place into cans covered in the cooking liquid. Provide 1 inch of head space and process for 55 minutes at 11 PSI.

Puree
I went with the Univeristy of Georgia's recommendations for fruit puree. Fruit puree was chosen mainly because I am only canning the bananas to use in banana bread. This way, if the processing isn't 100 percent effective I am then going to recook the bananas in the bread at 350 degrees for quite some time. Also if the bananas are already pureed it saves a step later. Due to the amount of discrepancy I wouldn't use this canned banana in baby food or another product you would eat raw right out of the can like, say, applesauce.

Lastly, there are some things that this version of fruit puree won't work for. As stated on the UGA canning website:

Important: These recommendations should not be used with figs, tomatoes, cantaloupe and other melons, papaya, ripe mango or coconut. There are no home canning recommendations available for purees of these products.

After all that, I was feeling fairly confident of the process necessary to can the bananas. Now I just needed to acquire them. Though we don't get a lot of our groceries from Save-A-Lot, they consistently have the lowest price on certain items. Bananas at .33 cents a pound is one of those things. Even more amazing, they sell their bruised or over-ripe bananas for .19 cents a pound! Twenty pounds of bananas later, I was headed home for a day of pureeing.

To make fruit puree for canning, you don't just mash up the fruit. That makes a substance which is way too gooey and dense. Secondly, you cannot water bath can bananas, so you have to have a pressure canner. Lastly, it also helps if you have a compost bin. After peeling that many bananas, I had quite a mound of waste which gladly filled up the compost bin with much helpful potassium!
Now that they were peeled, I broke the bananas into pieces and placed them in a medium sized stock pot along with the designated amount of water. This water is used to not only help in softening the fruit, but also to keep the sugar within it from burning to the bottom. For each quart of fruit, add 1 cup of water. I overshot this when I guesstimated and added eight cups (it should have been 6). It worked out fine, only I had quite a bit of runny banana glop left over when I strained the bananas out. Place the bananas on the stove and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently. I will warn you, the smell of cooking bananas is kinda nauseating. I don't know what there is about it, but definitely not a cozy, warm banana bread smell that I was hoping for. I decided to open up all the windows and doors hoping to flush it out as fast as possible. When the fruit starts to soften up and get all smudgy you can start to chop up any of the larger peices with a slotted spoon to speed the process or just wait another five minutes or so for it to all fall apart by itself. Using a slotted spoon I scooped the mushy banana goo out and into pint jars. Some people may opt to processe the goo in a blender, food mill, or food processer to make it nice and smooth. Twenty pounds (actually, I think it was 21 pounds) filled a dozen pint jars almost exactly. After filling I used a butter knife to remove bubbles, wiped the rims and placed them into the canner. Process for eight minutes at six PSI.

One odd thing I will let you know is that bananas turn pink when they are canned. I have no idea why, but almost thirty pints of bananas later, they are all pink. The first batch were canned in apple juice instead of water and I figured that was why. Um...no. The second round were canned in just plain old tap water and they are just as pink. It honestly kinda creeps me out! But, when I think back to The Spicy Barracudas baby food, most all the banana items were an odd sort of off-pink color. So many canned banana questions, so little time!

In reality it took much, much longer just to find out how I was supposed to can the bananas than it did to actually do the canning. I find this rather ironic, and a little silly. By the end of the whole research process it was no longer about just canning bananas for me. It became necessary for my stubborn self to know just why on earth this had to be so complicated! The results were well worth it, however, when there is chocolate banana bread on the line. With the thirty pints we now have an entire years worth of bananas and all for under 15 dollars!

Chocolate Banana Bread
Ingredients
1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup sugar
2 large (3 medium) eggs
1 pint mashed banana (2 cups)
2/3 cup Dutch process unsweetened cocoa
1 Tblspoon baking powder
1 cup chopped pecans

Directions
Grease muffin tins and preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Cream butter, sugar, eggs, and banana till combined. In a separate bowl whisk together flour, baking powder, and cocoa. Add the flour mixture to the banana goo in thirds, mixing thoroughly in between each addition. Fold in pecans. Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes. To make as bread, bake in 9x5 loaf pan for 60-75 minutes.

Canning, Canning, Canning, Keep on Pressure Canning, Rawhide! My grandmother canned like the Apocalypse was coming. (Indeed in her depression era mind, it probably was.) Even when she died there were at least another four years of peaches, pears, applesauce, and Lord knows what else in their basement. I'm not planning on going that far, but I have realized the immense amount a pressure canner can take off our monthly food bill.

My tax return became a pressure canner which meant that my kitchen became very, very sticky. A pressure canner is an amazing household appliance, but not one to jump into lightly. There is much more than meets the eye with a pressure canner. I did not know this.

The upfront is about $100 for a middle of the road canner. It is all the average household needs. Ours is a Presto, 23 quart canner and will be more than enough for anything we could ever need. The jars are about $10 dollars a dozen, and can be reused forever. The hidden secret is that it is A LOT of work. If you really mean to use it, you are going to be spending much time in the kitchen and much time cleaning. Then you will be spending much time figuring out where to put all the cans you have now created because they are too heavy for most shelving.

On the plus side, your food will taste much better than anything which comes from a store can; you will know what is in your food causing your sodium, high fructose corn syrup, modified food starch, and trans fat ingestion will diminish greatly; and you will save a significant amount of money if you plan your canning with the seasons and sales.

Canning chicken stock was a bit of a whim when local, never frozen, all natural chicken went on sale for .99 cents a pound. Our freezer is very small as our fridge is a 1950's avocado green Westinghouse. We've never had a lot of room to keep foods frozen and always just bought as we go. Though a chest freezer has been discussed, the energy to keep it running would basically negate any savings; let along where would we put it? This has meant the single largest food cost we have is meat for dinner.

Though chicken stock has been something I've made and frozen in smaller batches, large scale stockpiling has been out of the question. We now have 21 quarts, nicely labeled and put up. This will last us a nice long time and whittled away at least 30 dollars from a few months of our food bill. Even better, it was so easy.

Unfortunately, water bath canning can't work for meat so a pressure canner is necessary. Fortunately, many years ago canning was a standard in the household so if you ask around your grandmother, aunt, mother-in-law (etc.) might still have one laying around in the garage or basement. They last forever and with a replaced sealing ring (only about 10 dollars) can be reused over and over. So, ask around, it may not be as out of reach as you might think.

All you do to can chicken stock is prepare the stock normally and pour into the jars. I used quart jars as they just seemed more reasonable for a family dinner. I strained the stock and put the chicken into the jars first, then pouring the hot liquid over the top. Leave 1 and 1/4 inch head room at the top. Since it is a liquid, you don't need to worry much about bubbles being stuck inside. Glance at the jars, give them a little shake, and call it good. Also with pressure canning, the sterilization of the jars isn't as important. If they have been kept somewhere gross like an old attic, garage, or something it probably is, or if you have just purchased them from the store and not washed them, but clean shelved jars can be filled and placed in the canner without the added heating step. This is because you are pressure canning them and the inside of the container is going to get excessively (read explosively) hot. Trust me, they will sterilize themselves! If you still wish to be extra careful, go right ahead, but unlike water bath canning it isn't a complete necessity.

So the jars are filled, now you need to wipe off the rim of the jars so that you can insure a proper seal. The only thing keeping bacteria out and goodness in is the fact the jars are sealed air tight. Broken seal equals nasty insides. Yuck! Due to the fact that chicken stock is greasy, use a bit of white vinegar on a rag to wipe down the rims. This will cut the grease and be completely harmless. Place the lids, screw on the rings and fill up your canner!

They need to be processed for 25 minutes and 11 pounds of pressure. Be very careful that the pressure valve has fallen before you open up the canner, and that you lift the lid away from you as there will probably be some steam inside. Remove the jars with either tongs or a ovenmit and set them aside to cool for at least 12 hours.

Now you have chicken stock which will last for years (usually around 3-5 at the longest) without the need of a refridgerator, freezer, or much of anything! We use ours for burrito filling, enchiladas, soup, casserole, and pot pies. Just about anything that contains shredded chicken can be made from the stock at a fraction of the cost.

If stock isn't something your family would use much, you can also can just the chicken. When the sale continued an extra week, I went to purchase 2 more packages of chicken to be cubed up and canned by itself. This is even simpler than the chicken stock as all you have to do is boil the chicken till it is mostly cooked, yet still slightly pink. Cube it up and pack it tightly into pint jars. Then pour the chicken water over the top till you have 1 and 1/4 inch of head space. Pressure can for 75 at 11 pounds of pressure. One pint contains 1 and a half chicken breasts.

Though I used to be a coupon clipper, I've realized once you start buying most of your food in bulk and making it from scratch, coupons don't really cover that. What they do help with is canning food. Now by looking at what is on sale, I can go buy a couple dozen cans, hit the grocery store and spend a couple days in the kitchen. This will allow the coupons and sales to last much longer and save us significantly more! All together 17 dollars worth of chicken yeilded 21 quarts of chicken stock and 6 pints of chicken. This was well worth two days of canning!

When the idea of starting a garden first was broached to Jules, it wasn't one he immediately enjoyed. Well, that isn't true. He liked the idea of a garden well enough, however, he liked the idea of a yard much, much more. Initially, I'd planted a few fringe veggies around the edges and had a three tomato plants squished into one big pot. The turning point occurred when salsa found its way into the house. Jules LOVES Mexican food. Fresh salsa from our yard definitely made this garden thing a bit more worthwhile.

Now, the garden is extensive featuring seven 4 foot by 9 foot raised beds, a strawberry patch, blueberries, an apple tree, and an herb garden. It is wonderful! I'm bouncy about it whenever something new sprouts or we visit the local nursery. With all that produce we need somewhere to keep it.
Living in only 900 square feet, storage is at a premium. We just plain don't have the space to accumulate much. I quite like it as that means there is much less to clean and it is much easier to keep life simple. The drawback becomes having places to put all our extra bulk foods, canning, and fresh produce. My first thought was the garage, but Jules put a big veto on that one. It was for the best, we have way too much in there anyway. So next came the rather radical idea of a root cellar.

The very words root cellar seem archaic, but it makes a whole lot of sense especially as times get tougher and money gets even tighter. Basically a root cellar is a way to let Mother Nature do the refrigeration for you. Good root cellars both borrow and keep the cold. By digging in the ground well below the frost level the temperature remains as fairly constant 52 degrees and is slow to be effected by the extremely cold surface temperatures. In this way the veggies and fruits have protection from frost, and extra refrideration from the warm house temperatures. You can then emitt the extremely cold night air into the cellar (via vents or windows) allowing for the temperature to cool to between 32 and 40 degrees. With a pan or water for humidity (so the veggies don't crack or wilt) and two air vents to allow cross movement of air to avoid rotting, you're basic requirements are met. This gives you an extremely large, electricity-free, refridgerator. A finished or unfinished basement, an under the stair closet, a corner of your garage, even a hole in the yard can function as a perfectly good root cellar with little to no work after the initial set up. Canning and dry goods can also work well in a root cellar with only a small partition between the foods that need high humidity and cooler temperatures. In this way you can store large amounts of food and be able to "bulk up" when various fruits and veggies are in season and significantly cheaper not to mention better tasting!

Our root cellar is being put in by The Spicy Barracuda and I hauling up one 5 gallon bucket of dirt at a time. We are hand digging it out of what Jules has coined our "Hole." I honestly don't think he took me seriously when I said I was going to dig us one. But shovel and adz in hand the Barracuda and I began digging away. It is just plain hard work, but the exercise is wonderful and all the dirt has done nicely to fill our raised beds in the garden. The cellar is now coming along very well and we are beginning to consider shelving. The space is beginning as a way to hold our canned foods (most of this year's planting) and our dry bulk storage of 2 gallon buckets. As the space widens, and our garden yeilds increase, the Northeast side will become our actual root cellar to hold the cabbage, potatoes, carrots and such. The task has really been good for my exercising, and the Barracuda can now swing a adz like a pro! His arms are becoming very strong and he is really learning the value of watching his hard work patiently turn into a finished product.

Mostly I have been amazed at how simple this process has been. Though the work is physically tough at times, and you definitely get tired, the actual complexity of the project is minimal. You are mainly just digging away. There are many books which have been written on the subject and have helped me quite a bit when I first began and now as the spaces is coming to a point of some really setting up. Mike and Nancy Bubel have written Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables as a guide for anyone considering such an undertaking. The book is complete with plans, explanations, crop varieties, and stories of people from all walks of life and how they have created cellars for storage. Whether you are urban (like us), suburban, or rural there is something in this book which will suit you! My copy came from Powells. As far as I know they will ship just about anywhere!

Even if you do not have a garden or a space big enough to put in more plants than you already grow, help the local farm community at your local farmers' market. The markets are free, full of great family events and street entertainers, and provide you with a sense of knowing where your food comes from. This produce is normally cheaper by miles than the produce in the grocery store because you don't have to pay for the middle man and the enormous costs of all the overhead for the supermarket chains. Can it up, support your local community, and store it away to have great tasting veggies and sauces all winter long!

I still think of us as normal, but in all honesty this probably threw us over the top into the realm of what my son will refer to as "his weird parents" when he is a teenager. To stop buying packaged foods in favor of those made at home was a very simple change that our household has made over about 3 months and it has done significantly more! This never began as a way to "Go Green." It was honestly that our food bill was reaching $300 a month and that just wouldn't do. We couldn't just stop buying food, something else needed to be done, so slowly we began venturing into the bulk food section of our local grocery store. Bulk foods generally cost less money because they can be purchased by the store in very large quantities and they aren't packaged. What shocked me was that many of them were the exact same product just without the box, and we were just going to put into the trash (or recycling) anyway.

We get everything from grated Parmesean and Ramano cheese to locally milled, all natural, whole wheat flour. We can get all natural wild rice, organic beet sugar, multiple varieties of raw nuts, dried fruit, whole wheat pasta, dog treats, candy, dark chocolate chips, and bajillions of other things in bulk foods that we could never afford in the swanky natural section packaged up in small quantities. The greatest part is not only are we getting a product whose quality is better than the packed brand name, but we are getting it for cheaper.

This seems as though it goes against all common sense and depending on where you live, it might. We are not shopping at Fred Meyer (Kroger) with their small (though ever expanding) bulk foods or at Wild Oats (Whole Foods) and some upscale market places where everything costs more. We are fortunate enough to live around a regionally employee owned supermarket chain which provides dozens of selections of bulk food. However, an internet search might find you amazed at the number of stores offering such options. When our store stopped carrying raw sugar, I went on a quest to find more in bulk. The internet search gave me five other places which were much closer that carried the product. The difference in price was about 60 cents more a pound because the stores were independent and not a chain, but still well below buying the sugar in a package.

As much as Jules likes it, he has said it was the largest degree of culture shock to him. Where would we store all these jars of stuff? We are going to look into the pantry and not see anything to eat. This isn't the way normal people live. Coming out of a grocery store with all these bags of dried stuff, coming home to put all the dried stuff into jars on our shelves, not having any bright flashing plastic like presents ready to open caused him a mind glitch. Now, our cabinet doesn't have hardly any of them. Mainly we are now filled with large glass jars harboring everything from corn meal to black beans. However, Jule's admits his favorite part of this whole process is emptying the contents of all our bags into the jars and watching our food supply slowly grow. It is a level of security for him to know that every month we are slowly accumulating more flour than we use, more beans that we eat, more corn meal than I turn into bread. By having an ever growing (if however slightly) supply of food right on hand, it is a nice saving grace for the stress of a recession. It also means that if we don't have the money one month for a specific staple, we have some backup. As long as I create the snacks from the dried foods, he is happy to eat them. I like that the pantry is no longer clogged with box upon box of stacked treats and never being able to see anything. In fact we have more storage now than we ever did before!

The initial output for unpackaging you pantry is a little more because you have to have a place to store all of your culinary treasure that is now without its box. Standard glass jars can be purchased most anywhere (even Ikea) and cost around 10-20 dollars a piece. (I think we got ours at Fred Meyer (Kroger)) Once purchased, they last forever and are dishwasher safe. More than anything you want to be sure they have a lid that will seal either with a rubber ring and clamp or a twist on lid. This will keep the air out and your food from getting stale. It also helps with keeping the moisture from your food. Even simpler and without the cost is to save glass jars you would normally recycle or throw away. Many products from spaghetti sauce, to salsa, to sundried tomatoes come in glass jars with securely sealing lids. By running these through the dishwasher and saving them you have food storage without the cost of a large glass storage jar. The only draw back is merely size. If you chose to buy jars, you will recuperate your cost of the containers in mere months, have much better food to show for it and much fewer items in your pantry to take up space!

The initial thought I had about going over to bulk was "Where would we put it all?" I had no idea it would actually thin out our pantry because I had no idea how much packaged and processed food we actually ate. Now, that we have transitioned over to bulk foods and I have been reading up on the subject it kinda creeps me out!

Many things about the way our culture acquires its food I'd never really considered. However, I needed to do so reading up on ways to lower the costs of our household, and on ways to make it run outside of the mainstream. We were (and in many ways still are) a highly normal American family. I didn't honestly know much about food storage, or how much flour the average family uses in a month when making their own food (the internet tells all), or what goes into making corn bread without a box. So I hit the local library and began reading, I started with Google and began searching, I hunted down blogs and began asking questions of people who were living this way. That is when I began to realize the extent of our agriculture in this country.

Currently, each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles. The amount of fuel it takes to put a meal on the table outweighs the amount of energy we gain from consumption of the food itself. Not only is fuel consumption created in direct transport, but also through processing, packaging, warehousing, and refrigeration. This doesn't even count the fossil fuels used in the synthetic fertilizer and pesticide used to grow and keep the food perfect looking.

Just think of it this way, if every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. That's not gallons but barrels.
Statistics and Information acquired from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

Our families grocery bill is now $150 a month ($200 if you add the pet food and supplies) and we rarely ever go out to Taco Bell or Burger King anymore. We no longer associate cereal with a cartoon character, fruit with packaged gelatinous chewables, and Macaroni and cheese with a blue box. I make our food. I know what goes into it and where most of it came from. Our garbage bill has been cut %75 because we now have pick up only once a month due to a complete lack of packaging and an ever growing compost bin. More than anything else, we aren't getting sick anymore.

Jules spent most of last year feeling ill; when he got sick so did the Spicy Barracuda. Neither have had much over a day or two of feeling as though the onset of a cold might be coming. Though I have no direct evidence this is from a change in our diet and decrease in stress, there isn't much else that has changed. In general, we just feel better now that we eat better.