Make & Can Your Own Cranberry Sauce for Holiday Gifting

It’s amazing to me that some people actually prefer canned cranberry sauce to homemade.  I suspect much of the claimed preference for it is irony from the same folks who order PBR in a craft brewery, but it’s not all that: my own sister-in-law truly wants a log of the canned stuff on the Thanksgiving table.  Once a dish gets on that table, it becomes part of the family tradition. Whether or not anyone likes it or even actually eats it, it’s just got to be on that table until the end of time.  Woe be unto the host who decides to stop making great-grandma's black-cherry-jello-with-canned-black-cherries-in-it just because great-grandma was the only one who ate it and she's been dead fifteen years and now it just sits there looking sad and gets thrown into the compost heap every Sunday-after-Thanksgiving.  But I'm not bitter.  
 
You can't change tradition, but you can add new ones: our Thanksgiving table contains BOTH my own homemade sauce and the canned stuff my mother-in-law probably switched to sometime in the 1950s.

Why she or anyone ever switched is inexplicable to me, because there can be no comparison between grainy red Jello in the shape of a can and real cranberries cooked from fresh.  And there’s no excuse, either: of all the traditional dishes on the table, cranberry sauce is hands-down the easiest and quickest.  Prep time is about three minutes, and the sauce can be made days ahead so all you have to do on Turkey Day is put it into a serving bowl.  But switch they did, and in large numbers.  Ocean Spray sells 72 million cans of the stuff every autumn, a can for 2 out of 3 households.

So let’s see what we can do about switching them back: let’s gift them homemade cranberry sauce.  If you give it to them as a beautifully-presented handmade gift, they’ll probably at least try it, right?

So: easiness?  How easy is this:  You put cranberries in a pot with sugar and some spices, bring it to a boil, lower to a simmer, and let it cook ten minutes, stirring occasionally.  Yes, that’s the entire process.

Cranberry Sauce
makes ~10 pints
6 pounds cranberries (if you can't find bulk berries, 8 12-oz bags equals 6 pounds.)
4 cups orange juice
8 cups sugar
1/2 t cinnamon
1/2 t allspice
1/2 t cardamom
1/2 t nutmeg

Place all ingredients into a large pot, bring to a boil, lower to simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, until the cranberries pop -- about ten minutes.

What we’re going to do takes it one step further: we’re going to, er, can the sauce.  Go ahead, laugh, but OUR sauce isn’t going to slither out of the canning jar in a gelatinous sliceable mass.  And it isn’t going to contain high fructose corn syrup, either.

Canning instructions:

1. Fill your canning kettle with 7" of water, place canning rack into the kettle, and bring to a boil on your highest-heat burner turned on high.  Leave it on the boil.
2. Sanitize 10 pint jars (I usually just run them through the dishwasher.)
3. Keep the jars hot by pouring a little water into each, setting them into a 13x9 pan with an inch of water in it, and sticking the whole thing into a warm (170 - 200 degree) oven.  
4. Working with one jar at a time, pour water out of jar, then ladle the hot cranberry sauce into the jar, pushing cranberries down gently into the liquid so they aren't sticking up and adding extra liquid if necessary to cover them.  Leave 1/2" of space between the top of the liquid and the rim of the jar.  A canning funnel (a funnel with a wide bottom) is very helpful to prevent spillage.
5. Wipe the rim with a damp cloth, place a lid on it, and screw on the ring just until you feel resistance.  You don't want the rings on tight -- they're only there to keep the lids in place while the batch processes, and tightening them can prevent a seal from forming.
6.  As you fill the jars, set them into the kettle on the rack.  You'll need a pair of tongs for this; canning tongs are extremely helpful in grasping the jars securely.
7.  Repeat until you've filled the kettle.  Cover, and when the pot returns to a boil, start timing.  After five minutes at the boil, remove the jars and allow to cool on a cookie rack.  You should hear the lids pop as the seals form, and when you look at the lids they'll appear very slightly pushed-in.  Any jar that doesn't form a seal should be refrigerated and used within a few weeks. 
8. Allow to cool 24 hours before removing the rings, wiping the jars and lids clean with a damp cloth, and labeling. 

Eat Local Right Now

It is my conviction that it is possible to eat local in some way "right now" no matter what time of year it is. I had this great idea for that post in late March, early April. It felt a little too early, and now after a whirlwind summer it feels a little too late. I suppose that is the point, though, it is truly neither and I might as well begin.

I am Susan, I am a wife, mom to a nine year old and custodial step-mom to a 17 year old and 3 young adults, 2 of which at the moment are still living at home. Your guess is as good as mine about who might show up for dinner tonight. My husband and I enjoy the self-reliance and sustainability of eating local, both in growing our own food and from buying from growers and producers in our community. I love the nourishment of local food, as well as the connection and reassurance of knowing who grew it and how it was grown. We really find the whole endeavor fun.

I am also co-founder of the CORV Eat Local Guide. When the project began 4 years ago I remember saying, "this listing is important but it isn't everything. I have this list of farms on my computer and I'm still not eating local as much as I'd like." And that still holds true for me. In these posts I'm going to explore some of the various aspects of eating locally, hoping to continue to remove barriers for myself and inspire you as well.

I intend to post monthly about Eating Local, Right Now, and the posts will be a collection of what is possible for this time of year and what my family is actually doing. I honestly didn't do so great this year in getting to market regularly and in putting things up for the winter so it should be fun to see what we can accomplish a bit "after the fact" but then again this is about now.

It is now November, what does that mean for folks striving to eat local, right now, all year long?

In the Garden
We have carrots still in the ground I hope to harvest this week. This weekend we planted our garlic which will should ready in June.

At Market
Last night my husband, Ken, and I went to Northside Market. The Market is now indoors for the season and a great resource for local eating year round. We purchased carrots, potatoes, cauliflower, broccoli, eggs, apples and some local Hopi Blue Corn Polenta. There was lots more available onions, greens, beets, sprouts and microgreens, sweet potatoes, squash, and that is before the breads, preserves and specialty items.

In the Kitchen
November is still a good time to go to the Farmers' Market before you finalize your meal plans and grocery lists for the week. There is still lots of fresh veggies, apples, eggs, poultry, meats and cheeses. It's great to have a rough idea of what you'd like to serve in the week, but not so planned out that you can't utilize those great beets you didn't expect to see.

In the next week we'll have local ham (we purchase a side of pork about every 6 months) and local broccoli; local chicken, with local potatoes, carrots and onions; butternut squash soup with onions and squash from our garden; and the polenta I bought last night.

For the Root Cellar
We do have a root cellar set up in our garage, it is a small room with lots of shelves, a cabinet ventilated outside for squash, apples and such, and then hooks in the main room for garlic and onions. Here also lives our freezer. So for my purposes the root cellar really just means put away for later use regardless of preservation and storage method.

Our root cellar is as of yet pretty bare. In the spring I went crazy with strawberries and lost a lot of my enthusiasm for taking anything like that on with all the busyness of our home. I am realizing I might be more successful doing a little at a time. Last night after market and before the 9 year old got home from his dad's, I cleaned, steamed and froze carrots, broccoli and cauliflower. I'm definitely excited to try this little bit at a time method for the next couple of weeks to see if I can't stock up a bit better going into winter.

We also individually wrapped half of the basket of apples we bought and put them in a bin in the cabinet downstairs. That cabinet has several butternut squash from both my backyard and the farmers' market but otherwise is empty.

I'm thrilled to be sharing our story with you as we head into the holidays and winter. What does eating local right now mean for you?

Holiday Master's Canning Gift Basket Class

Sonya over at Jam and Jelly Lady in Lebanon has spots available in tomorrow's (Monday November 9th, 6:30 - 9:30) Holiday Master’s Canning Class.  Bring a small basket appropriate for two jars, and in class you'll make and fill the jars with with Holiday Chutney and Cran-Raspberry Jam and then make a wired ribbon bow and “stage” the basket for gifting. 

For more information call Sonya at 513.932.6470 or email her. 

Tomato Canning Class from Slow Food Cincinnati

Slow Food Cincinnati and Turner Farm are offering a hands-on field-to-pantry canning class with home canning expert Lydia Hirsh.  Participants will harvest organic tomatoes straight from the vine, peel, dice, pack, and process the tomatoes, and leave with 3 wide-mouth pint jars of chopped tomatoes.  All necessary equipment along with step by step instructions provided. 

$35 per person.  8:30am - 1pm, Saturday August 22nd.  Turner Farm, 7400 Given Road, 45243 (Indian Hill.)  For more information or to reserve space, call 513-561-7400 or email events@slowfoodcincinnati.org

Canning 101 at Park+Vine

Park+Vine is offering Canning 101: Preserving the Harvest on April 25 at 11:00am. Topics include planning for family needs, basic tools, recipes and local resources. Class is free, but registration is required and seating is limited to 25. 

Canning Classes

The Jam-and-Jelly Lady in Lebanon is offering hands-on beginning and advanced canning classes. The beginning class is a two-evening series that covers both water bath and pressure canning and is being offered March 17th & 19th and again May 19th & 21st for $65. Advanced classes are single-evening sessions for $25 and cover specific types of canning, including a class on canning with honey and one on marmalades.

Here's What Greater Cincinnati Needs

Here's a great idea: the Lost Arts Kitchen in Portland OR offers classes in traditional food arts. The woman who runs the kitchen says that with planning and training, families can eat locally, organically and ethically without breaking the budget or overwhelming the family schedule.  A similar effort in Virginia, dubbed Home Skills University by its organizer, runs free classes in everything from breadmaking to meadbrewing. 

There are many cooking schools here in town, with classes teaching everything from complete dinner-party menus to specific culinary techniques.  But who's teaching us to pickle, can, ferment, make cheese -- all the processes our great-grandparents used to store foods safely?  Parents stopped teaching these things to their children decades ago when "Better Living Through Chemistry" wasn't intended as sarcastic commentary.   We've gone from using convenience foods as a supplemental resource to being completely dependent upon them.  Canning is the most basic, easy, fast, and inexpensive way to preserve the harvest, and yet many under-30s have never canned anything or even seen anything canned.  Heck, many under-50s haven't.  And lactofermentation?  Most people, even many foodies, don't have any idea what it even means much less how to accomplish it.   

We need our own Lost Arts Kitchen.  I can teach canning, both water bath and pressure.  What can you teach?  (If someone can teach me to make a loaf of bread that will rise in the oven, I'll be eternally grateful.)

Canning Report 2008

I finally finished up my canning for this year (unless over the next few weeks at market something grabs me or I find some late tomatoes) and my final tally is:

Chili Sauce 7 half-pints
Chile-Garlic Sauce 1 quart
Dandelion Capers 2 half-pints
Dilled Green Tomatoes 8 pints
Ketchup 5 pints
Linda Lou's Sweet Pickle Chunks 15 pints
Garlic Mustard Dill Relish 6 pints
Peaches 18 quarts
Pepper-Vinegar Onions 4 pints
Pickled Beets 6 quarts
Pickled Cherry Tomatoes 5 pints
Pickled Hot Banana Peppers 4 4-oz jars
Pickled Sweet Peppers 13 half-pints
Plum Jam 8 half-pints
Stewed Tomatoes 10 quarts
Strawberry Preserves 9 half-pints
Tomatillo Salsa 9 half-pints
Tomato Salsa 13 pints
Tomato Sauce 19 quarts + 9 pints

I had been hoping to get nearly twice as much tomato sauce put up; what I ended up with is probably enough for four months, which means along about April we'll be back to buying tomato sauce to make spaghetti sauce with. I processed maybe two bushels of tomatoes into sauce, another one and a half bushels into salsa, ketchup, and stewed tomatoes. So next year, I guess I'm going to need to aim for 5 1/2 bushels. Aiieee. I'm going to need a heavier-duty food mill.

Food Production on the Homestead

Food Production on the Homestead
Washington Court House, Ohio
Saturday, October 4, 2008 1:00-5:00pm

Recently featured in Mother Earth News, Tom and Mary Lou Shaw will share the secrets of how they have been able to provide most of their own food without going to the grocery store. The Shaws' 13-acre farm is home to two Dutch Belted family cows and a small flock of Dorking chickens that together provide the eggs, meat, and milk products they need, as well as compost for their garden and orchard. Their garden and orchard provide a large variety of chemical-free vegetables and fruits, many of which they enjoy all year, along with fresh herbs, and flowers in the summer months. Homesteading is a relatively new career for both the Shaws. They will share what they are learning as they sculpt their new life and what they have planned for the future.

For more information or to register, email Laura Wies.

Free Online Home Food Preservation Course

The National Center for Home Food Preservation is offering a free, online, at-your-own-pace course in home food preservation including the canning of acid and low-acid foods. For more details or to register, visit Preserving Food at Home: A Self-Study.

The Culinary Pawpaw at the Cincinnati Nature Center

The Ohio Pawpaw Growers Association is offering a class called The Culinary Pawpaw on Thursday, September 25, 7 - 9 pm at the Cincinnati Nature Center at the Rowe Woods location on Tealtown Road in Milford as part of the center's Nature of Food series. Topics will include storage and processing of pawpaw fruits, nutritional values, uses in cooking as well as pawpaw trees in the home landscape. Samples of several varieties of pawpaws will be available for tasting. Each registrant will receive 2 pounds of pawpaws and a bread recipe to take home. Cost of the class is $7.

Pawpaws are a Midwest-native fruit that isn't generally found in supermarkets because it doesn't store or ship well. It is often grown organically because it has few pests. Which adds up well for fans of local, sustainable eating. They're available in farmers' markets in late summer/early fall and can be eaten raw, canned as jam, or substituted for bananas in recipes.

Canning Class Saturday September 13th

The Pea Pod Cafe (6227 Montgomery Road in Pleasant Ridge) is offering a free informal canning class Saturday, Sept. 13th from 11 am - 1 pm.   Participants will learn how to safely can and preserve the summer's bounty.  Topics will include tools and methods, reference books, and other resources.  Plans will be made for future in-home canning events.  For more information, call 351-2460.

Food Preservation Class

Cooks' Wares is offering a class called How to Preserve Fresh Flavor at their Springboro (Settler's Walk) location on Thursday, Sept. 11, 6:30-9:00 pm. Instructor Cindy Remm will talk about pickling, drying, canning, and fermenting foods.

Killer Canning, or How to Avoid Poisoning Anyone

Home canning is all the rage. Eating locally is in, and doing so year-round pretty much requires some kind of food preservation. No one's freezer space is unlimited, and home canning is a great way to preserve the harvest. It seems every food blogger is canning and offering recipes for the foods she's canned.



Unfortunately I'm seeing a large number of unsafe canning recipes posted on various food, recipe, and local eating blogs, and we aren't talking about just the kind of unsafe canning that gives you a few days of gastrointestinal misery. We're talking serious neurotoxins, botulism, paralysis, and death.



Here are a few key bits of knowledge, useful whether you're canning yourself or are the recipient of a home-canned gift.



Canning Fruits. In general, canned fruits are safe. Almost all fruits (exceptions include bananas, figs, and tomatoes) are high-acid, which means both that spoilage is less likely and that any spoilage is likely to be evident -- you'll see mold, or the jar when opened will have an off smell, or the seal will be broken. This is why so much home canning is about jams, jellies, marmalades, and other fruit spreads. HIgh-acid fruits are all safe to can in a boiling-water bath using a wide variety of recipes.



Canning Vegetables. This is where the serious food-safety issue comes in. All vegetables are low-acid foods and are unsafe to can in a boiling water bath unless sufficient high-acid ingredients, generally in the form of vinegar, bottled lemon juice, or citric acid, are added. The proportion of high-acid to low-acid ingredients must not be altered from that specified in the recipe. The problem is that often an experienced-cook-but-inexperienced-canner picks up a canning recipe and assumes her cooking experience can be used to adapt and improve the canning recipe. It can't.



Tested Recipes for Canning Vegetables. Unlike cooking recipes, which the cook can adapt to her own tastes -- increasing the proportion of one ingredient, omitting another entirely, using an unspecified technique such as sauteeing the veggies -- the canning of vegetables should be done using a tested recipe (that is, a recipe that has been tested by the USDA -- or the equivalent, in other countries -- and found to be safe for home canning) with no changes in the proportion of high-acid to low-acid foods. To be sure the recipe you are using is a tested recipe, use a trusted resource such as the Ball Blue Book (use a new edition, as canning recommendations have changed over the years), the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving , the Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving, or the National Center for Home Food Preservation.



When you discover a delicious-sounding boiling-water bath canning recipe online and think you'd like to try it, ask the person providing the recipe where he got it. (Most foodies are happy to talk about the source of their recipes and won't take this as an insult if you ask in a way that indicates curiosity rather than mistrust.) If he did not get the recipe from a trusted source, or if he adapted it in any way that changes the proportion of vegetables-to-acids, or if he added oils, fats, or animal products, don't use the recipe. Find another similar recipe from a trusted source and use that instead. The same goes for gifts of home canned vegetables, including combination recipes such as salsas, sauces, chutneys, and relishes. I cannot stress this enough. When canned vegetables go bad, one likely culprit is botulinum, which is the neurotoxin that causes botulism: if it doesn't kill you, it can leave you paralyzed. It is a seriously nasty bacteria and nothing to fool around with. Worse yet, unlike mold, you can't see, smell, or taste botulinum. The seal on the jar may not even be broken.



With the sharp increase in canning by inexperienced canners, we are likely also to see an increase in home canning-related food poisonings. Done properly, home canning is very safe and a great way to preserve the harvest so you can eat locally all year around. But do take the necessary steps to make sure you know what you're doing.



The National Center for Home Food Preservation is a great resource for home canners, new and experienced alike. The recipes posted there are all USDA-tested and approved, and they have a ton of information for home canners -- even a complete home-canning course you can download in pdf form.



Your county extension service is an excellent resource for information about canning. Many are offering canning classes geared to new canners.



Another great resource for canners is the Harvest Forum on GardenWeb. You can search the forum archives to find answers to many questions.



Originally posted at Eat.Drink.Better.

Strawberry Preserves (no-pectin recipe)

I wasn't planning to put up any food this month -- we're headed out of town for three weeks on Friday, and I've been so busy with travel plans that I promised myself no major gardening or preserving projects -- but the strawberries at Findlay farmshed Saturday morning just looked too wonderful. So I decided to do one batch of strawberry preserves.

I don't like added pectin in my preserves. The texture seems rubbery instead of gooey, and I'd rather do a little more work and get exactly what I want. Ripe strawberries don't have much pectin of their own, so most people either add pectin, add a fruit that does have pectin and make a combination preserve, or enjoy their yummy if runny preserves. But there's another way.

When I bought three quarts of gorgeous berries from Neltner, I was careful to select quarts that had a few berries with green tips -- this is the first secret to making no-pectin strawberry jam. There's pectin in unripe strawberries, and those with a little green left on them have plenty of pectin. The berries in this picture still have some green on them. You only need a handful of berries with green tips in each quart to provide enough pectin to gel your preserves.

I wash, hull, and roughly mash the berries -- leaving a lot of big chunks, as in my opinion that's what preserves are all about -- and then after I've brought it to a full rolling boil for five minutes, I pour the whole thing into a sieve to strain the berries from the syrup and put the syrup back into the pot for further cooking. That's the extra work part, but it's also the second secret to making no-pectin strawberry preserves. Cooking and cooking and cooking the entire thing down until it's reduced will also work to prevent runny preserves, but it also tends to produce a 'cooked' taste. Which is still good, but I want a fresh taste. So I reduce only the syrup, then add the berries back in after the syrup has reached the gelling point.

STRAWBERRY PRESERVES
Yield: approximately 3 8-oz jars of preserves per quart of berries

Strawberries, a few slightly unripe, slightly mashed
1 c sugar per cup of mashed berries
1 T lemon juice per cup of mashed berries (optional, but I find the lemon juice brightens the taste.)

Fill canning kettle with water to cover 1/2-pint jars by 2 inches, cover, bring to a boil, and keep it there.

Set 1/2 pint (8-oz) jars and lids into a pan of hot water over lowest heat. You'll need 1 jar per cup of mashed berries.

Wash and hull strawberries. Mash to big chunks and measure by the cupful into a large heavy non-aluminum pot. Add 1 cup of sugar per cup of mashed berries, cover, and leave for several hours. Bring to a full rolling boil 5 minutes, stirring constantly to prevent the sugar from sticking and burning. Remove from heat and strain through a sieve into a bowl, allowing syrup to drip through sieve for a few minutes. Set the sieve aside, return syrup to pot, add lemon juice, and bring to a boil, stirring constantly and boiling on high heat until candy thermometer reads between 220 and 222. Return contents of sieve to pot and return to a full rolling boil, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and ladle into hot 1/2-pint jars, leaving 1/2" headroom. Wipe jar rims with damp cloth, cover with hot lids and screw on lid rims without tightening. (The lid rims are only there to hold the lids in place during processing; tightening them can both interfere with processing and cause you to dislodge the lids when removing the lid rims before storing your preserves.) Set jars into canning rack and drop into boiling water in kettle. Cover kettle and process 10 minutes, remove from water, and set on rack to cool. Once cool, check seals (press gently in the center of the lid -- if you feel a slight pop and the center flexes down and then back up again, the lid didn't form a seal and that jar should be refrigerated and used within six months), remove lid rims and label.

Now to make some cream biscuits to put it on.

Time, Money, Recipes: Experience is the answer

For most of us, our first foray into local eating immediately reveals three problem issues: time, money, and finding appropriate recipes. For all three, experience provides the lion's share of the solution.

Time. No two ways about it, using local ingredients requires cooking from scratch, and cooking from scratch requires more time than using convenience foods. Time to shop for local ingredients from a variety of sources instead of simply picking up prepackaged items at the supermarket. Time to prep and cook. Time to clean up after prepping and cooking -- while a supermarket frozen lasagna requires only the cleanup needed to store the leftovers, a homemade lasagna can require cleaning up cutting boards, bowls, knives, a cheese grater, a pot for cooking the sauce, and the baking pan.

Time issues become less onerous as your experience increases and you learn to think ahead. For instance, if you're making a pot of lasagna sauce, why not triple the recipe and freeze the extra in two recipe-sized portions? And once you've found reliable sources of local ingredients and develop the habit of thinking ahead, your time spent shopping will decrease immensely. But even the most experienced shopper and cook will never be so efficient that scratch cooking equals the convenience of simply unwrapping a package and sticking it in the oven. If food is a priority for you and your family, experience will help but time will always be a required element.

Expense. Until you learn when food items are cheapest (hint: when an item is in season, there's a lot MORE of it available) and unless you're prepared to buy those foods cheap and store them for later, eating locally can seem more expensive than conventional supermarkets.

But once you learn you can buy fresh whole chickens for $2 a pound from late spring through early fall while the same chicken purchased frozen in winter is $3.50/pound, you can buy fresh all summer, stock your freezer late in autumn, and roast a chicken once a week year around. Using that chicken's bones to make stock each week will actually save you money as you no longer need to buy commercial chicken stock.

The same goes for produce -- the time to buy tomatoes is from mid-August through late September when farmers are practically giving them away. Spend a few hours canning (there's that time factor again) on a late summer day and you can put up enough tomatoes and tomato sauces to see you through next July when tomatoes once again appear in the farmers' markets in abundance. If you've got a lot more time than money, consider picking your own.

(A personal note on a related subject: I've found that paying the true cost of meat instead of the government-subsidized supermarket price has encouraged me to treat it more as just another ingredient rather than as the star of the meal, which is a much healthier way to eat.)

Recipes. Eating locally requires finding recipes whose main ingredients are either in season together in your local area (such as green garlic and asparagus, both of which are in season in spring here in SW Ohio) or are easily stored well into the next season (such as butternut squash, which will keep for several months and so can be paired with other autumn-ripening items and with late winter/early spring items.) But in an age when most people have lost the knowledge of what's in season when and most cookbooks ignore seasonality completely, such recipes can be few and far between. Instead, many recipes call for ingredients that are wildly out of season with one another in most areas of the country.

There's actually a lot of help out there at places like Seasonal Chef and River Cottage, and I've found a lot of help from vintage (pre-1940) cookbooks, but once again it's a matter of gaining the experience: as you build your collection of good seasonal recipes, you'll find it becomes easier to feed yourself using local foods.

Don't be daunted when you're first getting started. Plunge on in. Each step makes the next step easier, and each bit of new learning builds on the last. Visit a farmers' market. Buy what's there in abundance. Ask the farmer if he has any recipes -- many of them have a stack with them somewhere in their stalls. And be ready to learn to think of food seasonally, the way your great-grandmother did.

Finding an alternative to a 'Local Foods Pledge'

I've been asked by a group of folks who are putting together a local foods directory for Greater Cincinnati to write a 'Local Foods Pledge' to include in the directory. In general, I disagree with the concept, but I do want to help this group. So I'm trying to come up with something.

I'm thinking along the lines of providing a list of steps folks might take in trying to eat more locally, putting them into some general order of easiest and least time-consuming to most challenging, and then inviting folks to choose a point on the local eating scale they're going to aim for this year.

For instance:

Choose local over non-local when offered
Learn what produce is in season when
Switch to local honey & maple syrup
Switch to pastured eggs
Switch to local wines
Visit a farmers' market once a week
Add seasonal recipes to my collection
Freeze a frequently-used item during the season (berries, applesauce, tomatoes, corn, onions, peppers)
Can a frequently-used item during the season (preserves, tomato sauce, tomato paste, enchilada sauce, chile sauce, pickles)
Join a CSA
Purchase a side of grass-fed beef (or half a pastured pig)
Join a herdshare

This is just off the top of my head, and I'm not sure I have them ordered correctly. For instance, is joining a CSA, which requires a weekly trip to pick up the CSA box, more onerous than purchasing half a beef which then must be fitted into the home freezer? Is canning more of a challenge for most people than where I've placed it? Is visiting a farmers' market weekly easier than switching to local wines? I put 'switch to local honey and syrup' ahead of 'switch to pastured eggs' because I figure people only buy honey/syrup every once in a while but many buy eggs weekly, but maybe eggs are easier?

What other steps could folks take? Where would they fit into the scale?

All suggestions and advice gratefully accepted!

Retrovores

As Michael Pollan recommends in his newest book In Defense of Food, "Don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." Which brings us to a newly-coined word for those who eat the way Grandma used to: Retrovore

It's a great concept, carrying implications of beyond-organic, beyond-sustainable, beyond-unrefined, beyond chemical-free. It implies eating mostly local seasonal foods and a developing a habit of home preserving. And unlike the term 'locavore' it doesn't reject the inclusion of trade-goods, such as tea, coffee, chocolate, spices, olive oil, citrus. And it's intuitive, with little inherent controversy over nitpicky questions such as 'how local is local?' to ease the way for those who fret over whether or not they can still drink coffee. I don't know whether it will be any more palatable to those who scoff at the idea of locavorism, but I like it.

Putting Food By: Meatloaf

This week I took my last two meatloaves to friends who are laid up, so today I made up another batch. I made one for dinner tonight, took another to a friend as a gift, and put the other four into the freezer.

I generally make five meatloaves from a quadruple recipe, but as I was measuring them out tonight I discovered that I could get almost exactly six 32-ounce loaves from the quadruple recipe, so I decided to try dividing it that way to see whether the smaller loaves were a good size to feed my family. I've been reading Brian Wansink's Mindless Eating, and one of the issues he points out is that American cooks tend to cook for a crowd, planning for seconds and leftovers. He argues this encourages overeating.

Putting Food By: Spaghetti Sauce

We had baked ziti the other night (still looking for my forever recipe for baked ziti -- this one called for ricotta and was too lasagna-ish) and I made a double recipe of my husband's grandmother's sauce to use in it. I ended up with 11 cups of sauce for the freezer, so today I stuck 3 3-cup packages and a 2-cup package into the freezer.