2 ~ Larder
Winter is still with us. Some thawing is in the forecast, but dawn this morning found the thermometer at 0F (-18C) in this small, cold-sink of a valley.
I thought it would be good to summarize the current status of my provisions, the starting point, here at the end of February.
BTW, the photos that will accompany these blog posts are all from the house, land and surrounds here, mostly taken by me (with basic equipment). No stock photos or downloads from Google Images (unless otherwise noted).
After a rough start last spring, due to some cold wet weather and woodchucks (and some missteps I made), my organic vegetable gardens recovered and finished pretty well. At harvest time, I dove into pickling and canning – far more than ever before in my not-so-long gardening life. I put up 176 jars, totaling 216 pints, of pickles, sauces and ferments (just over 100 liters, for non-American friends). In November, deer hunting season yielded one spike buck (less than hoped for - although the deer might have a different idea), and I canned most of the meat with my neighbors Allen and Judy (and their recipe and know-how), and we divided the output
Courtesy of a new Food Saver vacuum sealer (a new best friend), I also put a fair bit of garden produce into the freezer – things like raspberries and green beans.
Cornmeal production, however, was down. For several years, I’ve been planting a beautiful corn descended from seeds originally from Guatemala (a gift from the gifted Martín Prechtel, https://www.floweringmountain.com), whose ears vary from a deep, nearly black shiny purple, to another form I call “red calico”. I alternately plant one or the other race each year, and this past season it was the turn of “black purple”. At least the raccoons seemed happy with the choice. On just one late summer night, a coon family swept through the patch and consumed about half of the milky, adolescent ears. I managed to protect the rest of the corn crop until maturity and harvest, and without killing a raccoon. Mainly with helium balloons, and playing music and audiobooks all night out the window facing the corn patch. Seemed to work, and I eventually got some wonderfully aromatic blue cornmeal, for pancakes, cornbread and offerings.
Fruit also took a hit, especially apples and summer-bearing raspberries (the fall-bearing raspberries, which don’t have canes above ground over winter, did well). The issue may have been last winter’s polar vortex. We had a morning in January 2019 when here at the house it reached -32F (-36C). About five days later, at about 5 am on January 31, it reached -40F (-40C). And possibly colder - that’s the lowest my digital thermometer can read, and my bulb thermometers aren’t much help anymore at that range. The nearby town of Blue Mounds was officially reporting -40 at the time, and I’m invariably a bit colder here (due to being lower). Certainly one of the coldest temps (and perhaps the coldest?) ever recorded in the southern counties of Wisconsin.
Back to today. Below is a full summary of my remaining food stocks on hand now - what’s left after the eating, gifting and potlucking since the harvest and my last trips to a grocery store. Some key shortages I see looming are fat (oil, butter), citrus (for cooking) and onions and garlic (I still have some frozen leeks that will hold me for a little while). I’m not someone who will feel deprived by lack of tofu, or Pepsi.
I have a housemate, Andrew, who is an active and excellent cook, so pilferage of his stores is one solution. However, I don’t plan to go there (we’re Driftless here, not shiftless). I’ll see what I can creatively figure out. If anyone local reading this would like to barter some of the above items (or chocolate) for anything listed below, please let me know! (or anyone willing to pay postage on a jar of pickles).
Remarkably, here in snow-crusted late February, I’m still getting some produce from the garden. More on that in the next post.
For now, for those of you intrigued by details, here’s an inventory of my larder, my departure point for the rest of this journey, as of February 29, 2020:
In canning jars (for my overseas friends, 1 quart = about 1 liter, and 1 pint = about 1/2 liter):
Pickles: 81 pints remaining (cucumber dills, sweet ‘n sour cukes, green & yellow beans, beets, broccoli, green tomatoes, jalapenos).
Salsa: 3 pints (Need to make more of that next season! A new recipe, and it came out pretty well.)
Sauerkraut: only 1 pint left (the red cabbage kimchi I made is already gone)
Fermented mixed vegetables: 2 pints
Apple-rhubarb sauce: 1 pint (the apples from a local grower)
Apple butter, from my friend Greg: ½ pint
Venison in bone broth: 13 pint jars.
I also have several pints of wonderful fruit preserves from the Driftless, gifts of my neighbor Judy, and from the Swiss Alps, made by my girlfriend Corina (quince jelly and wild lingonberry preserves).
Down sleeping in the chest freezer (all from the garden and land, unless otherwise noted) -
Morels (now I have your attention…): 2 bags left of sautéed morels (about 1 pint each). It was a good season in spring 2019: Corina and I collected 31 pounds (14 kg) of those woodland miracles, with about half of that total found under just two motherlode trees (dead elms, natch).
Yellow and green beans: 7 bags (ranging from about a pint to a quart each).
Diced tomatoes: 4 bags (about a pint each)
Tomato sauce: 2 jars
Leeks: a bag of about a half dozen whole stems (and their dirt); alas, some potato-leek soup that earlier graced the freezer is now finished
Braised red cabbage: 1 bag
Squash soup (made from butternuts and hubbards): 5 jars and tubs
Raspberries (all fall-bearing): 11 bags left (about 1 pint each; the few frozen blackberries and strawberries from the harvest, and rhubarb, are all finished now)
Honeydew melon: 6 bags and tubs (the frozen cantaloupe is already finished)
Capuns (a Swiss mountain delicacy, made with chard from the garden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capuns); 2 bags
Pesto: about 1 pint
A few small packages of elk - salami, loin steak and burger - from my near-neighbor, Jack.
Venison brats: 2 left from a doe killed on the land by Greg (and in the fridge some excellent liver sausage – braunschweiger – from the same animal).
A venison back roast, from the spike buck.
Two organic New York strip Black Angus steaks, from cattle raised by my neighbors Al & Ginny.
One black bear steak, from my friend Mitch.
An organic chicken, purchased from nearby Seven Seeds Farm.
A pumpkin pie (from the garden).
A blueberry-blackberry pie, from the Friends of the Mt. Horeb Public Library pie sale.
A wild caught filet of Alaska salmon (some brown and book trout my brother Tom and I caught in Driftless streams last summer and fall are now just memories).
Wonderful whole grain bread from nearby Cress Spring Bakery: 2 loaves
A quart of wonderful bean and sausage soup from from The Shoppe in Arena.
In the basement, I still have a couple of pounds of garden potatoes, and a few squashes (hubbard, acorn, pie pumpkins and delicata – although the delicatas in particular are fading fast).
My kitchen cupboards hold a fairly good stock of flour, but a critical shortage of chocolate. About four cups of the blue cornmeal, some commercial yellow cornmeal, some rice, a few commercial cans of tomatoes and garbanzo beans, and a can of salmon. Some pasta, a box of stale graham crackers, a package of oatmeal, some Swiss bullion cubes. Enough peanut butter for mousetraps, but not much more. A pound or two of dried beans from the garden (such as pintos). A fairly good supply of spices, and some condiments, sugar, honey, salt, tea and coffee. Some grapeseed oil and canola oil, and balsamic vinegar.
In the fridge there’s still some cheese from Switzerland, and some from Willi and Qitas and their nearby Bleu Mont Dairy. Last weekend I gifted a friend with my last pint of the land’s 2019 maple syrup, but still have some I purchased last summer from Amish near Viroqua (about 1 pint). A pound of butter. And from my wonderful Dominique hens (the ‘nuns’), almost two dozen eggs on hand (no artificial light in their convent, yet they’ve been pumping out eggs without pause all winter. Proud of ‘em. Go girls go.).
Over the past few weeks, I had my first go at making kombucha (a fermented tea drink). First batch is a reasonably successful, tasty outcome, flavored with juice drained from thawed raspberries. I have about 3 finished pints left, and another gallon on the hoof.
For foodstuffs that’s pretty much it, except a few odds n’ sods I may have neglected to mention. Let’s see how far it can go…
Next up – from land to larder in late winter.