Preserving the Harvest

It's always nice to eat fresh, but sometimes you've just had your fill. Or you know you'll want a fill later. I always preserve berries, either in jams or by freezing. I used to can blueberries for a ready-made sauce, but it's way easier to freeze them whole and whip up a 5 minute sauce when you need it.

The Berry Deal

I'm a firm believer in using two hands, and I'm not a fan of blueberry rakes. I wear a 2 quart jug fastened to my front by a belt. One hand holds the branches, the other picks--it's easy and fast. No spilled berries unless you fall!

I let blueberries soak in water for a few hours to purge any worms. I clean them then spread them in a single layer on a baking sheet. I freeze them on the sheet then transfer them to gallon-sized plastic bags. (This can work for any berry). After the summer gorge of crisps, muffins, pancakes, and waffles, three gallons of blueberries does the trick for my family. Red huckleberries are frozen if I can keep from eating them all. I store salmonberries, in the form of jam, and it's our most coveted flavor. I always go crazy on jam since I want to try so many combinations of fruit and spice. Luckily, they make great gifts!

We also make fruit leather, as my son is a huge fan. Huck and I made bunch berry/blueberry leather this week that is almost gone already! Bunch berries are bland alone, but they mix in with other things wonderfully. They are easy to find, easy to pick, and are ready when most other berries are done.We used about half blues and half bunches and an old mushy banana. The trick is to not over-dry it and to roll it off the drying rack while it is still warm. Let the rolls cool then store them in an air-tight container in the fridge.

 Chicken of the Woods

I know nothing about mushroom identification. That said, you can't really misidentify chicken of the woods. It's bright orange, grows on the dead or living trunks of trees, and appears out of nowhere. When it blooms, it's all over town. It's meaty and delicious!




 I usually saute mine in oil and eat it like I do any other mushroom. I put it on pizza, in stir fries, and in burritos. I recently had some boiled, breaded, and fried by the Wabi Sabi crew at the JAHC market. SPECTACULAR! This year, I decided to try preserving it. After searching a bit on the internet I decided to try four different methods. Freezing raw, freezing after sauteing, drying raw, and drying after sauteing. The taste test will come in a month!

It's out right now, so go on a hike and find your own stash! Remember not to take all you find, and leave the bases attached to the tree trunk so they can continue to grow. 

Herbs

I can't come close to using all the herbs I have. Last year I dried oregano and rosemary. Both were great. This year, I gave flavored vinegars a try. I was inspired by a friend who gave me some apple cider nasturtium flower vinegar last year, which was phenomenal on rice. I did a trial run of 12 quarter-pint jars. I tried using white, apple cider, rice, red wine, and white wine vinegars. For the herbs I used sage, thyme, oregano, rosemary, and even nasturtium leaves. It'll be interesting to see what combinations are best.  They are all steeping in the dark for a few more weeks.

Garlic

I wash off my garlic and let it dry on a wire rack. I put a sheet of newspaper over it to keep it dark while it dries, and I have it in the living room so there's some heat from the woodstove. I usually store mine in fridge, but I've recently read that just cool and dark is best, so I'm going to try storing some in a mesh bag in the shed and some under my kitchen sink. I only have about 20 bulbs to keep, so I don't need to worry about saving them too long. At the JAHC market last week I bought 4 different types of garlic from Orsi Organic Produce to use as my planting stock. Their website has Juneau directions for planting, caring, harvesting, and drying. They recommend planting garlic 1-2 inches deep. When I dug the last of mine up yesterday they were 5-6 inches underground--opps! I guess garlic ain't tulips!

Next week I leave for a moose hunting trip, so hopefully I'll be busy wrapping, canning, and drying! What are you going to save this fall?

Eating is Wonderful

Sometimes there's just so much fresh food to eat my belly never has time to growl. Here's what a plate sees on a typical day at our house:

Breakfast (6 local ingredients)

Burritos:
     Local: Eggs, kale, onions, chives, chicken of the woods mushrooms
     Purchased: butter, tortilla, hot sauce

Lunch (10 local ingredients)

Salad:
     Local: 3 or so varieties of lettuce, kale, nasturtiums, onions, peas, carrots, garlic tops, chives
     Purchased: olive oil, vinegar + flour, yeast, salt, and butter for homemade croutons

Supper ( 7 local ingredients)

Stir Fry

     Local: Moose steaks, onion, kale, garlic, garlic tops, chicken of the woods mushrooms, parsley

     Purchased: Rice and hot sauce

When I opened up the rice lid--after having prepared the colorful stir fry--I was utterly disappointed. What a bland and distant pot compared to the skillet! The only reason I made it is because Huck would have eaten moose and nothing else otherwise

Dessert (2 local ingredients)

Tea and berries

   Local: mint, nagoon berries, thimble berries, or red huckleberries, oh my!
   Purchased: optional butter, oatmeal, flour, sunflower seeds, and flax seeds if we want a crisp

25 local ingredients in one day. 

We are so lucky to eat so well! 

(and you could be this lucky too!)

Can you believe my son won't try a vegetable even when I prepare them like this?! 

At least I get a kick out of it!

 .....Now if I can only grow my own chilies to make my own hot sauce!

Fishing and Shrimping

A hump of a humpy!

Tossing it in the tote

 Gillnetting is done and now I get to stay home for more than a couple of days at a time--what a relief! It was a great season of family gillnetting, but I'm looking forward to living without the constant blare of a diesel engine and being able to actually walk around.


Our life is completely surrounded and supported by food. The thousands of pounds of salmon that we catch to make our $$ is just a start. We have a good time getting delicacies for ourselves in the downtime of fishing. Huck, the self-proclaimed man in charge of the shrimp pot, scored us plenty of prawns last week with a little depth-finder know-how from Dad .

Shrimping

 

 Huck starts with a shirmpy voodoo dance.....

...then hauls it in until he feels the pot.....

  ....Mom or Dad takes over......

 

....then Huck puts them in the bucket! 

 Mom pops the heads off, 

Huck throws the heads overboard for the halibut to eat, 

mom sautes the shrimp in butter, 

and we all stuff our faces, 

Sriracha sauce optional.

We also scored this tanner crab who happened to be standing on top of the pot when we hauled it in! 

We are so lucky to have this life! 

Jammin'

I just finished my 7th batch of jam. Blueberries were a bust last year, and we were very glad I had frozen and jammed copious amounts the preceeding year. This is another stock up year. Here are recipes of what I've made so far:


Rhubarb Medley
4 cups Rhubarb
1 cup blueberry (frozen from last year)
1 cup strawberries (thanks to Costco)
4 cups sugar
1 box sure-jell pectin







Triple Rhu
2 cups Rhubarb
2 cups blueberries
2 cups strawberries
4 cups sugar
1 box  sure-jell pectin





I also made a lot of spruce tip jelly, which I had never tasted before. We absolutely LOVE it! It'd also be great with apple and cinnamon in it. I plan on drying extra crab apples this fall to save for next spring's spruce jelly. To make the jelly you need to make juice.

Gather about 18 cups of tips when they are bright green and soft. If you wait until they've opened the picking goes much faster and I couldn't tell a difference in flavor. Put the tips in a large pot, add water until it's just below the tips, cover, and boil. I followed one recipe that required 1 hour of boiling and 3 hours of simmering. I couldn't tell a difference between that and the batch I just simmered for an hour. Do what you want! Once you've boiled to your heart's content, strain through a sieve and you have spruce juice. 18 cups of tips makes enough for two batches of jam.

Spruce Tip Jelly - yields 3 pints
3 cups spruce juice*
4 cups sugar
1 box sure-jell pectin

Spruce Tip Honey Jelly -yields 2 pints
3 cups spruce juice
1/3 cup apple juice
1 cup honey
3 tablespoons no/low-sugar pectin

Time to eat!

I just ate my first salad of the season--a modest toss of fresh spinach, sorrel, and onions. I added kalamata olives, homemade balsamic dressing, and croutons Huck made from homemade bread.  I could go on about the other courses of the meal, but I'm too stuffed to think about it!

Turnips, garlic, spinach, carrots

Most of he vegetables are looking good and have been thinned. Things range from cotyledon stage to a foot tall. One thing that really surprised me about the early planting is the cold tolerance of sprouting seeds and emerging seedlings. I would have thought kale and chard to be among the most stout, however they were the last of all things to come up and have been the slowest growers. The kale that I started inside then transplanted is looking great though, and they far outshine their garden-sowed same-aged counterparts. Peas, lettuce, and spinach are more stout than I gave them credit for--next year I will plant lots of each in my first plantings for the year.

Just-planted zukes and squash

Over-wintered kale going to seed

I've been working on making small rock beds on the ends of the wooden raised beds. They're for perennials and really make the garden look like a nice place to hang out instead of just a vegetable factory! I never would have thought a few shrubs and flowers could make such a difference. I even got my parents to dig up and send a couple of wild hazel nut trees to me. We'll see how they do!  On the sunny day we had a few days ago Huck grabbed his camp chair and said, "Mom, let's go enjoy the garden," to which he hauled his chair up the hill, into the center of the garden, and sat. We're really enjoying the native plants--from the delicate current flowers to the marsh marrigold flowers, from the frilly ferns to the wonderful skunk cabbage musk. While all the vegetables in the garden are off and growing, it's left me with time to do a bunch of native landscaping. It's been fun, and I'm on my way to my long-term goal of representing all of Juneau's plants in my yard. 

Villous cinquefoil

Trailing black current

Yellow marsh-marigold

Today Huck and I started picking spruce tips from the giant trees in our yard. It's our first time, and we're pretty eager to see what we can make. Huck decided to make tea and I chose jelly, which I found instructions for here. We picked about half of the 18 cups of tips we'll need.

Local Food Reality in a Temperate Rainforest

I think it's important to recognize that our food production is limited in some ways, but then steam ahead full-force anyway. Almonds and avocados don't make sense. Okay, that's fine. Apples and kale don't make sense in South America--so what! There are two ways to look at it depending on how extreme you want to be. One, you can buy what you can't produce and work really hard to produce and gather what is available here. Two, you can choose to opt out of the things you can't produce, i.e. instead of buying oranges eat berries. I prefer a mix of the two scenarios. While I pick and store enough berries, apples, and rhubarb to supply us with various forms of fruit year-round, I'll admit that I love bananas and I'm not ashamed! I also know that I can't grow wheat for my bread or rice for my...rice. I'm okay with supporting farmers who can produce those things. What I don't like is paying someone to grow, package, and ship something that I can grow myself. I'd love to see the day when the grocery stores do the Juneau Sprout thing. I want to see Juneau kale in every store. Juneau chard. Juneau lettuce. Juneau rhubarb......

I stumbled upon a squirrel cache this week and was completely enamored by it. There were hundreds of pine cones piled against a fallen tree and at one end was a pile of the spent peelings. It really struck me how vulnerable we have made ourselves by always counting on the grocery store to be there...or for it to have food...or that we'll have money to buy food...or a way to get to the store......There really are so many ways it could all shatter and we could starve. It makes sense to have a cache, even if you don't fear the world collapsing. Why give up the ability of a squirrel?

 For my stash I:

Freeze: blueberries, rhubarb, kale, chard. spinach, smoked salmon, and any of the various meats from our hunting forays. We only eat wild meat, so in the fall we really get out and hunt. We also raise rabbits, which we freeze and eat fresh.




Dry: Apples, blueberry leather, meat, fish.


Can: Meat, whole blueberries, various goulash jams, beets.

And bypass preserving by the Live and Fresh Method!

Many things keep in the garden until October, and some things go beyond.  Rosemary, chives, oregano, and garlic tops can go in indoor pots. Kale, onions, and carrots stay put in the hoop houses outside, ALIVE AND WELL at New Years and beyond...Chicken eggs and rabbit meat year-round.

And realize that this is just a start! I've only had my garden for three summers and I feel like I haven't put much effort into trying to grow extra for preservation--this season preservation is one of my missions!

So what food can Juneau produce?

Here's my list of successes. Many of my failures I don't consider final, so I won't call them un-doable here. I'm sure other people have grown and gathered many other things in addition to these, so set up your own experiment!

Wild for the Gathering:

Deer, Moose, goat, ptarmigan, grouse, ducks, geese, salmon, trout, cod, halibut, crab, shrimp, bull whip kelp


Blueberries, strawberries, salmon berries, crow berries, cloud berries, currents, cranberries, and crab apples

Dandelions, chickweed, chicken of the woods






Cultivated:

Arugula, mustard greens, spinach, lettuce of many varieties, swiss chard, kale, beet greens, thyme, tarragon, cilantro, oregano, rosemary, nasturtiums (to eat), carrots, peas, onions, chives, bunching onions, string beans, beets, radishes, garlic, broccoli, brusselsprouts, cabbage, gooseberries, and sunflower sprouts. Limited success but showing promise for cucumbers, summer squash, zucchini, asparagus, raspberries, and strawberries. 

Eggs, rabbit meat, turkey meat.




Look at all that food! If you eat a lot of each of these things you really can whittle away at your shopping cart. I eat salad pretty much every day from June to October and feel satisfied for the year. Why bother buying California lettuce for several winter salads a week when I just ate fresh homegrown salad every day for 5 months?! The change of fare is welcome by that point.

It doesn't take much space to get yourself eating locally either. Try a hanging basket of nasturtiums--you can eat the leaves and flowers in salads, burritos, or in dressings and sauces. A window box of lettuce goes a LONG way. A pot of garlic adds mild garlic flavor to anything and everything--just snip the greens as you need them. Anyone can find a berry in Juneau. Carry a mug and fill yourself up whenever you're out. It's amazing how a little can go such a long way in pancakes or muffins. Take little steps and before you know it you'll be running like a toddler. It's really that easy once you give it a try!