#winter stash

[balkanradfem]

Various squash I've grown for the winter:

Lots are hardened zuchinni varieties but there's two butternuts and one pale green pumpkin that might be kabocha? I'll find out when I open it.

[balkanradfem]

On garden and winter food

I've decided to go and take inventory of all of my canned good, to figure out what kind of stash do I have for this winter, and to know how quickly am I allowed to go thru it. Half an hour of counting and sorting in my basement informed me I had 37 jars of salty-sour types of preserves, and 32 jars of sweet preserves. This is more sweet stuff than I've had in the past, but not nearly enough of salty-sour. 'What was I thinking?' I said to myself, and then I remembered, no, it's not for a lack of planning, I was sick the whole summer, I've done all canning I possibly could. The lesson was just not to get covid in the summer.

Still, I was worried it wouldn't be enough to get me thru the winter, and, since I've been so sick and neglecting my garden, it wasn't going to start producing a lot of new food anytime soon. Not going to the garden for so long really affected its production.

I later remembered, that I forgot to count all of the non-canned stash. I've put extra effort in dried food this year, I have over 10 jars of dried goods (tomatoes, zuchinni, mushrooms, roots, fruit), and there are many meals that can be made out of that. I also have plenty of potatoes, my two big bags of walnuts, many squashes, lots of garlic, and, the ability to still forage for apples and wild edibles.

Usually at this time I would be getting lots of carrots and broccoli from the garden, and some kale, but since it wasn't all planted in time, I have none of that. What I do have is black radish (or turnip, I'm not sure if it's black radish or black turnip. It's white on the inside, and big), celery, parsley, chives, cabbage savoy (not very big), swiss chard, green onions. Which is not a whole lot, but it's a valuable source of fresh produce. I also could possibly locate the jerusalem artichoke planted somewhere in the field, I love eating them during the winter.

I've had to face my own food issues, and that is that I'm incredibly stubborn not to buy anything that I can make myself, and also lazy to make it myself after I don't buy it. For instance, I could make a meal from pasta and a sauce made with sun-dried tomatoes, but I refuse to buy pasta, and I'm never starting the food making process until I'm hungry. So I end up never making it. The entire ordeal can be avoided if I reserved one day, to make a big batch of homemade pasta, have it dry, and then I could make tons of meals from dried good and pasta! Like pasta with mushroom sauce, pasta with zuchinni sauce, cabbage and pasta, pasta salad, those are things I would definitely eat!

In this spirit, I did gather my enegry and made a big thing of pasta, occupying the entire kitchen while it was drying for the whole day. Then I stuffed it all into a large jar, and now I have a big decorative jar with pasta sticking out, and it looks so pretty, now I just never want to eat it. Nobody has yet figured out that it's pasta in the jar, everyone thinks it's some decorative plants in there. It's understandable, since I'm known to put plants in jars for decoration.

I also have some new exciting preserves that I made for the first time this year! My first innovation was related to the pears; we have a pear tree close to the building, but it produces extremely tough and difficult to eat types of pears, everyone just ignores it. Except me, I scurry around it and scramble to collect all of the pears and then I cook them into a compot, feeling like an evil mastermind for figuring out how to eat them. Eventually, I got tired of the compot, and then I figured I could try making a pear-sauce, like an applesauce, but with pears. I wasn't sure if it was gonna go well, because they were so tough and not very sweet, but the result was absolutely fantastic; it's smooth and delicious and sweet. I love this more than I love applesauce. Pleased with my pear-related success.

I also made a spicy jam, made out of blackberries, grapes and plums, and then I added a few hot peppers in. I did this because every single winter I am longing for sweet-spicy mix, and I felt that I would want to eat it. And I was right, when my sinuses started to act up, I was grateful to have a spicy preserve that could make them clear up. I actually think it could be spicier next year.

I'll find out this winter, if I prefer eating the preserves or using the dry goods for recipes, drying is definitely easier and takes less effort, but it should be eaten before February, when the bugs eggs will start to activate inside, making it way less appealing. So that's where the canned goods come into play, they are completely protected from being eaten or spoiled. Hopefully next summer, I'll be healthy and better at getting more canning done.

[balkanradfem]

Garden plants you can grow and eat during winter!

Winter and Spring are the dry period of gardening, because most of your vegetables will start giving produce in summer and fall; it's common practice to can, ferment, dry, freeze and otherwise preserve summer and fall produce for the sake of winter food. It's somewhat unreliable to expect to be able to survive on canned and preserved food only for several long months of the year, so I've been looking into what can be grown as fresh food during the cold months.

Collard greens are  one thing you might be able to grow in the winter, if your winters are mild. Keep in mind, that even winter-hardy vegetables that can withstand the frost and the cold, will not grow very fast, or maybe grow at all during the days of short light hours, and the way to have them during winter is to plant them in your fall garden, have them grow almost to their full size during the fall, then leave them in the ground during winter. This year, I was able to harvest leeks, broccoli and kale during the winter, even as they grew thru the summer. I've seen other people leave cabbage and cabbage savoy in their gardens as well.

Roots: carrots, beets, and turnips. These can be grown to their full size, then left inside of the soil for the entire winter, to be harvested whenever you feel like eating them. Carrots should be harvested before the full spring hits, as they will easily go to seed (or at least it happened to me twice), making them inedible. There's also a bit of a danger of pests getting to them before you do, so don't plant all of them in the same place.

A plant that is actually harvested during the winter is a jerusalem artichoke; this is a plant related to a sunflower, but it grows underground tubers, similar to potatoes, they look a lot like ginger in appearance, but taste somewhere between a potato and an apple. I had a great amount of them pan-fried last winter, and got used to their taste so much I started to crave it.

It’s also possible to grow broccoli during the fall and winter, it’s going to be a little slower if there’s a lot of snow, but in a mild year, I was able to harvest a bunch in January.

If you have a minimal ground cover, or a little greenhouse setup (can just be stick and a greenhouse cover, or a big transparent plastic tub  covering the soil), you can reliably grow lettuce, arugula, kale, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, radishes, and other cold-hardy plants.

Some mild winters might allow you to harvest swiss chard, spinach, parsley and celery way after the growing season is done, and I've had such luck this year, and had a decent amount of greenery in the cold months. Outside the garden, dandelions, daisies, rosehips and some wild seeds are foods that are usually found even in the cold months, and can be integrated into salads and dishes as an additional nutrition, the wild plants are packed full with vitamins and minerals you might need in the winter months.

Combining what can be grown, and what can be preserved will offer you a great variety of dishes and nutrients during the cold season, and with a bit of planning and knowledge, you can sustain your food security all year long. If you know about more edible plants that are available thru winter, please let me know! I'd love to have more food at my disposal during cold.

[balkanradfem]

So something very exciting for me is happening right now, where I now have enough fresh produce to make meals from the garden alone, but also! I've noticed that the stuff I've canned last summer, didn't run out yet. As in, I still have several jars in the basement, filled with food preserves, ready to eat anytime. And this means, that last summer, I actually canned more food than I explicitly needed for the winter. I've saved more food than I was able to eat! And I wasn't being frugal or careful during the winter, whenever I felt like eating a preserve, I would grab one. So this means.. I'm ready, I'm capable of canning a winter stash that survives me the entire winter + spring! And I now have 'lazy food', which means, if during the summer I'm not feeling up to cooking for that day, I can just grab something already done. That is incredible. I genuinely didn't believe I would reach this point, because I used to struggle so badly getting enough food, to think that now I have things prepped in advance, it sounds kind of mad!

I've been canning loads of sour cherries this spring, on top of making 12 jars of compote, I made 3 bottles of sour cherry juice, and 2 little jars of jam! With all that, my basement already looks kind of, stocked! But that is fine, because one can never, ever have enough preserved fruit. Since I'm now bringing in fresh preserves together with my last-year preserves, this means that this year, for the first time ever, I actually need to write out the date on my jar labels! Because they're not all just from last year! Stunned and taken aback by this development. Now if only I was also growing enough legumes and grain not to have to visit the store, I'd be so ready to live outside of capitalism.

[balkanradfem]

Okay so, I dug up some potatoes this summer, and I know potatoes need a few days to dry before they’re ready to be stored, so I put them on top of some newspaper on my balcony to dry.

However, I completely forgot about them, and left them on the sun for about two weeks, and now I went to collect them, and some of them have turned... green.

I remember if any part of the potato plant is exposed to the sun for a long time, it becomes poisonous, same works for potatoes, if they grow out of ground, they turn green and poisonous, but I didn’t think it would also happen to potatoes I’ve already harvested. I also remember eating green-ish potatoes before and being fine, though it would be just one green in a pile of yellow ones. Only yellow ones turned green, my red potatoes just got darker.

Does anyone know for sure if these potatoes are poisonous now? I’m tempted to still eat them, but at this point I don’t exactly want to get poisoned. Also if they are poisonous, it’s not a waste, because they could still be good as seed potatoes! Even if they’re poisonous, they could grow normal and healthy potatoes, or at least this is my hypothesis. Did anyone try this out?

[balkanradfem]

Đuveđ recipe!

I found this canning recipe in an old, all-text cookbook, and scribbled it into my little notebook. It goes like this.

Ingredients: 6 eggplants (smaller), 3 zucchini, 3 onions, 3 tomatoes, 2 peppers, 2 carrots, salt, 2 garlic heads, fresh parsley, oil.

Cut all ingredients into cubes, except peppers, who are to be cut into straps. Saute the onion and carrots on oil, add garlic, peppers, eggplants, zucchini, and when it's all sauteed, tomatoes. Add salt and spices as desired. Optional: add vegetable stock or dried vegetable mix. Store into jars when it tastes good.

So naturally I was a bit leery of the first bit, 6 eggplants? That is too many eggplants. I modified that part to 1 big eggplant. And for the acidity's sake, decided to add some vinegar in to make sure it would preserve well. So this is what I put in instead: 1 eggplant, 4 peppers, 1 zucchini, and the same amount of tomatoes as eggplants:

And here's everything cut:

In the pot, and canned.

I did this exact recipe last year, and it was by far my favourite, by the time it's all cooked, it gets very watery, because both tomatoes and zucchini will liquefy, and peppers add some water too. So the end-game for this recipe is when you open the jar, to pour it in a pot, and cook rice in it! Rice soaks in all the extra liquid and the vegetables are the exact acidity to go great with rice. An even better way I discovered, is to roll out some dough in the winter, pour a jar of this on top, and bake it into a pizza! It's a perfect mix of toppings already cooked in a tomato sauce.

I feel from the amount of eggplants in the recipe that this was just the way people used to store eggplants, the rest of the stuff was just to make it taste good, and the eggplant is acidic enough to keep bacteria out of the jar, so you'd be able to add carrots and zucchini, which would not keep well canned on their own (except if pressure-canned). Good to know for whenever I have an abundance of eggplants!

[balkanradfem]

So I became very spoiled by my food stash, I've been opening whatever I wanted to eat all the time, and I swear I brought in from 30-50 jars by now, it's around that number, and today I wanted to have sour cherries for a dessert after lunch and wasn't sure how many were left; I'm supposed to live on this stash until May.

So I did an inventory! I took pictures for all of you to see.

I took the shelves apart, and omg, it was not stable, at all, it was only held together by that heavy bag of potatoes and as soon as I took it out, half of it collapsed, I forgot I put it together like that. Nothing broke and all jars are safe. 

I put it back together, this time grouping all same types of jars together, making a list of what is where, and putting all jars I'm most likely to want on the top. This is my inventory:

10 jars of salsa, 7 of tomato sauce, 7 of sour cherries, 7 jars of applesauce, 3 of đuveđ, 2 of tomato chutney, 3 pepper chutney (ajvar), 2 strawberry jams, 4 pickled peppers, 1 blackberry jam, 1 rhubarb jam, 1 winter salad, 2 of pickled cucumbers, and like 7 squashes and one bag of potatoes that are soon to go bad.

I deem this enough, and it immediately became clear that I can have all sour cherries I want. They will be in season in 4 months! I already decimated the most delicious things like pepper chutney and winter salad, I must make more of that next year. Đuveđ is also half gone, but, it's delicious?? I cannot resist. Only thing I haven't touched is applesauce, and it's because I still had fresh apples available until a week ago, so I ate myself sick to the point where I had no need for apples anymore, but I might start feeling like it if I don't eat them for a few months. It's gonna be my May snack.

[balkanradfem]

Eating from the garden during summer was a breeze; I almost always had more food than I knew what to do with, and kept picking favourites. I'm curious to see what will happen next, because the garden is still producing food for me; my peppers wont stop producing until the soil freezes over, zucchini is making new fruit for me constantly, swiss chard is looking even better than in summer, I have scallions, kale and strawberries growing. And the main gift of fall are pumpkins, I've been eating pumpkins every single day of the week, in every way imaginable, and can't get enough.

I've also planted a very small wave of fall green beans and peas, just to see if I can have them again. I wanna have peas for the winter solstice so I'm going to freeze however much they produce. They've been growing really slow but they're still flowering and making pods! I'm excited to see if they survive the frost.

What I'm hoping to get thru the winter are carrots and broccoli, I think kale and chard might survive the frost, but I want these two to be the main foods. At this point I have bunch of food canned, frozen and dried, so I'm not worried about the winter, however I am worried about the spring!

The spring is the actual hungry period where people struggle the most with eating home-grown food, because barely anything produces early. You can get onion greens and strawberries, and that's pretty much all I had last spring. Peas will start growing early but you wont get to harvest them until April. Some cabbage, lettuce, or carrots might have survived the winter, but if you plant them in spring you need to wait until summer to get them full grown. You can plant radishes and get them early, but all of the big producers, like zucchini, cucumbers, green beans, potatoes, peppers, wont give you anything until May/June. You don't get tomatoes until the middle of July! It's a fairly long period of not having much, I remember until sour cherries were ready (in May), I was just eating nettles and dandelion greens (they are very good for me).

So I'm going to try and figure a pace in which I should eat my winter stash so it lasts me until May, and not just thru a few winter months. This just means that if I can still get food from nature, I'm going to eat that, instead of opening a jar because I feel lazy and because it's sooo easy and delicious to do just that. I'll also try to forage more, make more ferments, and plan meals so I'm using what's producing right now. I'm also going to stalk apple trees more, to see just how late in the season they produce, I went to harvest some today, and got a full bag of perfect apples! I've tried stir-fried apples with a bit of sugar and it's my new favourite thing to eat.

If there's more convenient plant that produces in early spring and I'm just not informed about it, I wanna know! I did get asparagus transplanted into my garden this fall, but I've never had it before so I have no clue what to expect. I will definitely post more about meals that can be made from the garden and nature as it gets harder and becomes a challenge, then doing it anyway comes with pride!