The Biggest Kitchen Table - Canning and Preserving.

This is a post in Rhonda's Biggest Kitchen Table series. The idea is to share what you know about a specific subject in your blog/on the Internet. The way our Great Grandmothers would have done around the kitchen table. This months subject is preserving food. We are new at preserving our own food and have only been doing it in any serious way for the past year or so. Mostly we preserve fruits and vegetables, though I am working up to canning shelf stable butter and might try my hand at pickled fish later in the year when the fishing fleet comes back and fish is cheap and plentiful at our favourite dock.

Currently the home preserved stocks are pretty low at our house. Here in the Northern Hemisphere winter is nearly over and the spring vegetables are just starting, we are eating everything that we harvest. Overwintered carrots and beets, a few leaves of chard are all that has come out of the garden in the past month. We do still have several gallon bags of rhubarb, green beans, tomato sauce and vegetable stock in the freezer, several jars of green tomato pickle, sweet pepper relish, plum butter, dried tomatoes in oil, pumpkin butter, cherry jam (it must have been lost, there is no way it would have survived this long) and the newly canned GRAPE JELLY! I cannot tell how excited I am about the grape jelly. It's pretty silly really, since we didn't even grow the grapes, and not terribly sustainable since I used commercially prepared juice, but man is it good!

The best thing I have come across in a long time is a book called "Don't throw it, Grow it!" by Deborah Peterson. It's a way of growing greens from root vegetable tops, tops that you might otherwise feed to the worms, compost or **Gasp** throw away! We work too hard for our vegetables around here, we throw nothing away. Usually all vegetable scraps ( carrot peels and ends, onion skins, mushroom ends, green bean ends, beet roots etc..) go into a freezer container where they wait to become vegetable stock. Every meal, I put a few scraps in and usually by the end of the week there is enough to make a small pot of stock. I add the scraps to a saucepan and cover with water. I also add a good pinch of salt and pepper. I leave this to simmer, adding more water as necessary for at least two hours, sometimes longer depending on how long I am at home. Then I pour the cup or two of stock into another freezer container. Over the course of a month I can make 6-10 cups of delicious vegetable stock for use in cooking grains, or making gravy. There is really nothing quite like it. The spent vegetable matter then goes to compost.

Now after reading the Shibaguyz take on "Don't throw it, grow it!" I just might have to keep out some of the root vegetable tops and see if I can't grow my own fancy micro green jungle.

I know some of you are waiting for the grape jelly post.....patience grasshoppers! I have to make sure it jells before I can tell you how fantastic it is.