Supplementing with the grocery store, Its prettier on tiktok, what it really looks like, what to do with home canned goods. making them look good, Stock and Super Stock, cooking and prepping outside for summer canning ,

 The pantry is full. I finally achieved a goal I have been aiming for since I started this journey.   When I first started gardening and canning, I was supplementing my grocery shopping with my home created and home-grown goods. As of this year I am supplementing my pantry full of homemade and home-grown goods with the grocery store. It feels ... well... right.  It feels like I've come full circle. My grandmothers did this. My mother did not. She  was raised post WW2 with lots of advertising and just plain propaganda telling the young women of  the last half of the last century that commercially canned food is safer and growing your own food takes away from your leisure time.   They were told that mass produced ..everything... was better and safer.  Mom bought it.  All of it.  She once told me that only poor people have to grow their own food.  That was the message she was given by big agriculture.   (just fyi... she is currently rethinking that message and has a garden of her own now). But i digress and that is a conversation for another day...... So, Last nights dinner was breaded pork tenderloin with  green beans and mashed potatoes and pickled beets.  The veggies came from the  garden, the meat... from the store.  As the season goes on I will need to buy potatoes ...soon. I simply don't have the room  to grow enough potatoes to last the winter.   I might buy the big bag at the restaurant supply store and try canning them.  I'll have to think about that.  I'll need to buy celery because I didn't grow any ... My celery gene is right up there with my beet growing gene... sigh ... anyways.....I think I'm ready to  put most of the canning stuff away. I'll probably keep the Nesco handy because it can water bath as well as pressure cook and it does not take up precious stove top  space. 

I still have a lot of fruit in the freezer that needs to be dealt with. I don't think I am going to can it.  I think most of it is going to get fermented.  Yep, that's what I said.  Ive put out a couple of gallons of some really yummy stuff the last couple of years. I have such a variety of fruit in gallons bags that I'm thinking of just piling it all in a five-gallon bucket and making a mixed fruit wine.  I'll let you know.   This year, Dad and I have been doing a tag team on some of the stuff that is fermenting now.  I'm doing the labor and dad is providing the expertise. We should have a really nice plum wine by Christmas.  

One of the things I have been making all summer is  stock.... beef, vegetable, chicken and Super chicken... I don't know what else to call it. It's your regular chicken stock but with chicken feet thrown in for extra collagen.. Its supposed to be really good for you soooo, I thought i would try it. I made five pints.  The last 3 days I have been feeling   under the weather so, I  brought out a jar and made chicken soup. I can't tell if it's the placebo effect or if I really do feel better.  We'll see. I made enough for a few meals .  Even if it isn't the cure to what ails me.... It still tastes good. And it makes all the work during the summer and early fall feel like it was worth it. Which brings me to the original point of this post. What to do with all the jars full of yummy. I can take a spoon to the apple sauce but not so much the apple butter or the   jams and jellies. A friend gave me a book called ' The Food in Jars Kitchen".  Dozens of recipes for using your canned foods.  The thing I like about the most about this book is that all the bread recipes are easy and good. So are the pastries.   I'm looking forward to bringing   hot scones to my next bunco night!  

My next canning job is to organize what I canned... because honestly ...its chaos in the pantry right now. I was so busy doing the canning and so desperate for space that I put finished jars of... whatever... into any flat box I could find and threw them on top of each other.  And each box contains the finished product of any given day, so some boxes are all pickled beets, some boxes are a combo of pasta sauce, green beans, pickles, carrots and whatever else   I did on that day.  I'm almost tempted to put a photo of my canning pantry up here.... just to show off the chaos.  But I think I would be embarrassed... Ive seen too many  instagram reels of perfectly coiffed pantries with beautiful hand built wooden shelves lining pristine white walls with perfect rows of nicely labeled ,shiny glass jars.   I gotta give the influencers credit... They make it look easy, and they make it look pretty.  And the influencers look so pretty doing it. I didn't see a drop of sweat on any of them or a work shirt covered in tomato splash.  Their counters are clean and their cabinets are  pristine. ...... Do you know how much sauce, jam, jelly, gravy, and what all else I had to scrub off my cabinet doors everyday  during the process? Canning isn't just about  getting the food into jars and getting them sealed. It's about all the scrubbing of pots and pans and cleaning the appliances and  just generally washing down the whole kitchen almost every day.   Its work. Don't let anyone tell you any different.  When I was a kid I wondered why my grandmothers did so much of the prepping and cooking for canning outside.   Now I get it. It's easier to clean up outside after peeling 50 pounds of apples or   pitting 40 pounds of plums. You can hose the sticky mess off the porch but you can't hose down the kitchen....To that end I set up a work area under the carport. That's where the roaster, the slow cooker and the dehydrators stayed all summer because it was cleaner and easier and because I have a kitchen the size of a postage stamp.   It also helped keep the electricity bill under control. Cuz once the cooking and canning was going strong... 87 degrees outside made for a 97 degrees inside. So I kept  as many heat producers as I could out of doors.  I also worked all day with the doors and windows open and in the evening turned the ac on and sighed with relief. And in case you are wondering.... Yes, I had  dehydrators and slow cookers running all night long under the carport. And no I didn't have any problems. No midnight visitors, aka racoons or  other critters, the heat and machine noise seemed to keep them away.   At least that's what I think was happening.  

I have some ideas for organizing the process better next year. And I can't believe I am already thinking about next year while the water bather is still warm from this years  harvest...

aerogarden, hydroponics, safe salad, retro media, tainted food , food recalls, easy solutions, grow your own, indoor small space gardening, winter garden. there are solutions

 Blog Math.... I started this blog... 19 years ago... 19....19. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around that but... there it is.  19 years ago, when I started it, my blogs were 2 or 3 paragraphs... with a  little bitching and complaining and a little astrology, bunches of art talk and the occasional rant about politics or tv. I wasn't even posting once a month. I had a few friends that read it and that was just about it.  Then I started casual gardening, got a few chickens and the next few years the posts were basically just reports about what was going on in the backyard and in the kitchen.  Chickens and 100 year old recipes were the main focus.... and it was fun. Then in 2018 I had a major health crisis. It kicked my ass. It was the final straw in what had increasingly turned into a nightmare marriage with an increasingly verbal and emotionally abusive husband, who took the opportunity to become physically abusive when I was at my lowest point.... ever.... and I didn't have the strength to fight back.   My friends and family stepped up and took care of me. They created a circle of safety around me and kept Jimmy from getting too close until I could function on my own. The little red house was my sanctuary for almost a year.  I healed slowly. Everyone helped. AND...  Just as I was able to be functional again...Covid......And well.... we all got our asses kicked in that one.  I wasn't blogging at the time because I just didn't have the stability  or heart to continue what I was working on or... so I thought.   And like everyone else, I thought blogging was dead. I thought it had been replaced by Instagram and Tik Tok. But, there is a place for the written word with some history behind it. Unlike the influencers, I have been around for a while and I have shared my journey for many years So, here we are again...... I begin again....    Everywhere I landed, I planted a little, cooked a little and preserved a little and learned what other people were doing.  This post is about what I learned from a friend while I was staying in her back room. While I was with her she introduced me to the  Aerogarden. Its a houseplant size hydroponics garden that is completely self sustained while it is growing.   It is, my friends, a handy little gadget. She has a small six hole  Aerogarden. She grows everything in it from herbs to   geraniums. I was so impressed I got one for myself. At first I only grew kitchen herbs,... basil, cilantro, parsley, thyme... chives.  Then I got another one. One for herbs, one for lettuce and other salad greens. Then I got another one. I grew snow peas in January in that one. It was next to the kitchen window and once the plant matured, I had a nice batch of snow peas every week for the winter. I had a lot of fun  with these. Everywhere I went  I set up the whole family of hydroponic gardens. I have 4  big nine hole  gardens and a few six  holers. I pretty much always have a mini vegetable garden going in some corner.  And it really was just to keep my inner gardener happy.  And then came all the food recalls.  I could veer off here and go into a rant about how we got here, why our food isn't safe and who is responsible but, for the purposes of this post, we are going to stick with the useful tool topic.  Also, I am sticking with the brand name that I started with. There are lots of hydroponic gardens out there right now so if you don't want .... or cant afford the  name brand, there are good options available.  After I turned another friend on to these she got a knock off from amazon. She loves it and says, 'it does the job'. When all the lettuce recalls happened a few months ago, I just walked over to the hydroponics shelf and made a salad out of romaine and italian basil.   I have had a bad habit all my adult life of letting lettuce go wilty  (and sometimes worse) in the fridge and have often wished I had learned about aerogardens years before I did. But information comes to us when we need it.

If you need or want to grow some of your own food, I highly recommend one or more of these.  If you live in an apartment or somewhere  that an outdoor garden is not a realistic consideration these are a good option. The small ones are about the size of a 2-slice toaster .. Double that size for the nine hole.   They fit in lots of small spaces. I have a friend with a studio apartment that keeps hers in her bathroom.   They pretty much fit anywhere...apartments, tiny homes, studios etc.. They are easy to set up and the directions are easy to follow.  The brand name aerogardens come with everything you need to get started including seeds. Most of the knock offs come with everything but the seeds.  They all have internal timers. They turn on the lights and pumps without you having to do anything but set them up.  They tell you when to add water and when to add plant food. The plants germinate and grow at a really fast rate. Far faster than growing in soil.  If you are going to grow lettuce and other greens you need at least the 6 hole garden. The reason is the root base of the lettuce needs some space to  grow.  Aerogarden currently has a 3 hole on amazon for a very low price.  It's a good place to start if you are not sure how much you want to invest in indoor gardening.  I'm going to link a couple of them here so you can go look at them.

Aerogarden Small 3 hole

Aerogarden medium 9 hole   I like this one because it has a computer screen to tell you what is going on and walks you through set up... every time.    

And for comparison, here is a knock off I picked at random because the price is way affordable. It has everything you need to get started, except seeds. So, just know you might need to pick up a couple of packets of seeds. I recommend romaine and basil but... grow what you want. Affordable with good reviews

I think that's it for this post. I tried to give some history on how I got involved with the gardens and what the outcome is. And it is pretty good.  They also have an extra benefit... One friend says they really help with seasonal depression. The grow lights make up for living in   classic PNW winter gray