Planning for Food Preservation, Part 1

I am taking stock of my pantry and how we fared over the winter. This was the first year that home-preserved foods made up a significant part of our diet.  There were things I wished I had (or had more of) and things it's been a chore to eat, so I will plan my garden and shopping this year around these changes.

I really love the pickle relish, which was something I only made to get rid of a surplus of different-shaped cucumbers.  My husband wants some dill pickles, and wasn't crazy about the bread and butter pickles.  I need to plant more cucumbers because I didn't have enough that were the right size at the same time for different pickle recipes - the mental note I made last year was to plant 10 (I had 4 last year).  

I love watermelon rind pickles, but two batches was probably more than enough, because they really aren't something I serve with a meal, they're almost a candy.  The pickled beets are pretty good, but I'll never again can plain beets - they bleed out all their color and flavor.    

The last time we raised chickens for meat, in 2010, I canned a bunch of chicken pieces (skin-on, bone-in), and those have been surprisingly good, considering they look like they belong in a mad scientist's lab.  I'll do that again this year.  

Red salsa (the kind you eat with chips) is good, but I don't need much of it.  No one was crazy about my ketchup, but I might try a different recipe.  I really wished I had more spaghetti sauce and/or whole or crushed tomatoes.  My assessment last year was that 50 tomato plants would give me enough for our annual consumption, if I stay on top of harvesting and preserving.  When my husband asked me what I want for my birthday next month, I told him I want him to build me a solar dehydrator.  Tomatoes are going to be the #1 thing I dehydrate, for grinding into powder, which will be used to make tomato paste.  The bulk of the tomatoes we grow are paste varieties, or small-fruited varieties that can and dry well, and are also more productive and less fussy than large tomatoes.  

I am also planting some squash varieties for drying, as discussed by Carol Deppe in The Resilient Gardener.  Canned squash is another never-again for me, as is frozen squash; but squash pickles are good.

The tomatillos and green salsa I canned haven't been as useful as I'd hoped.  I actually enjoyed the frozen versions I made better, so some tweaking is needed there.  

With jams and jellies, I've had more failures than successes by far, and very frustrating failures.  My strawberry jam, which is too ugly to share, tastes and smells good at least, so I'll plan to try that again.  That means a pick-your-own field trip, because my strawberry patch is small enough that the berries never make it indoors.  I want to make mulberry jelly this year with our own mulberries and some foraged ones (our one tree would probably provide enough if 95% of them weren't too high up to pick.)  My gingered peach preserves were delicious, if a little stiff, and I might make two batches of those this year (and be more careful not to overcook them).  The canned peach halves are so pretty I can't bring myself to eat them, but they were great for Christmas gifts.  So, I might need two boxes of peaches this year.  The early peaches I bought were much sweeter than the late ones, which is the opposite of what at least one of my canning books suggests.

A single $20 box of sweet corn grown down the street (I grow field corn so I don't grow sweet corn) gave us more than we could eat this year, though we would have eaten it if times were leaner.  I felt like the pressure canner gave it a funny, metallic smell.  I don't know if it's my old canner, or if this is a characteristic of pressure-canned foods (I've noticed it in other mild-flavored foods I've pressure-canned too).  I might try dehydrating some sweet corn this year.

I'll cover root cellared and overwintering vegetables, and grains, beans, and seeds, in Part 2.