TOTM August 2016- Beyond Farm to Table: Preserving the Harvest

I get my cheese cloth at restaurant supply stores and on line through amazon. I use all grades and mesh sizes for all the different uses. the ultra fine can actually hold water, while the coarser sizes are "corn" size and every thing in between! The nice thing is that other then meat aging, most can be washed out and reused!

 

Use Apple cider vinegar with a small amount of actual apple cider, Chilled will work wonders for shelf life. keep covered with a towel until you are ready to process! You cal also dehydrate and vac seal for later, but you loose a lot of the juices! Also, you can do re fridge jam to get it ready for later preserves and canning, or us as is!

 

• Apply a little butter to the cut side of a cheese wedge to make sure it doesn't dry out.
  
• Cheese should be kept in the warmest part of the fridge, such as the vegetable or cheese drawer.
• Store eggs on the middle shelf of the refrigerator to make them last 3-4 weeks longer than their date of expiration.
• If you keep milk in the fridge door, it will go bad sooner than if you had put it in the middle of the fridge.

• Store potatoes with a few apples - this will stop them from sprouting.

• As for mushrooms, you should store them in a paper bag, not a plastic one, to keep them fresh.
• Wrap lettuce in tin foil to keep it fresh and crisp for much longer.

• Use, or rather, re-use bottles to close up your plastic bags.

• To revive old bread, rub an ice cube on it and then bake it for 12 minutes.
• If you cook corn kernels in a bowl topped with a plate, it will reduce the number of unpopped kernels.
• Tomatoes last longer when stored at room temperature rather than in the fridge.

 

I have never seen this set up before. Those are vitamin bottle tops. I love that you can snap open and pour. More info or link to directions please. Thank you

 

you just cut off the top portion of the bottle, then push the bag thru from the bottom, cut off a piece of the bag and screw the lid on, You can tape the plastic on the outside of the bottle but that is too much work in my opnion. Its just so you can easily reseal the bag and quickly open it.

 

Storing squash tips I found. Not sure if these work but the article linked recommended doing these steps:

Storing Winter Squash: How To Keep Squash For The Winter

 

Storing Potatoes:

*** air holes are very important.

Storing Potatoes

 

This guy wrote an article on his top 9 most common food preservation. The article incorporates meat preservation also but he had one method that I did not know about- preserving food in olive oil. I quoted his first two but follow the link for the whole list.

Common Methods of Food Preservation - Survivehive


One thing I do think about is that people store so much in their freezers and occasionally we hear of a freezer stopping and people losing hundreds of dollars in food. What is your plan on this? Example: you have 20 pounds of berries in your freezer. The freezer dies or the grid goes down. What are your plans to not lose or waste the berries?

 

Smoothies for the neighborhood.

Then show them the empty fridge/freezer so they know I don't have any more.

 

I wonder about changing our eating habits in order to survive and store food. Most of the "primitive" world has adapted to foods that store well. Bread, pan cakes, flour tortillas, various Indian and African breads, pastas, crackers, etc all use wheat that will store for years if kept sealed and dry. Corn bread, corn tortillas, polenta etc all use corn which will keep and often use some agent to enhance it that will also store for years. There are dozens of ways to user soy beans as they are and hundreds more if you store the materials to make bean curd, temphe, etc. Almost all of the grains and seeds can be sprouted and will keep for a long time before they are sprouted. Oatmeal, oat flour, etc will keep in the grain form and can be processed at the time needed. Same with peas, beans, lentils, etc can all be stored dry for at least a year and then cooked. The Koreans have made an art out of storing cabbage, radishes, etc as fermented products as did the Germans. The whole world knows of the Irish and the potato and the result of depending on one crop for food. Still potato, squash, pumpkin, turnips, carrots, etc , will store for months in a root cellar or in the ground if covered with straw etc. Onions, garlic, lots of teas and spices, etc, will keep for months in a dry storage area. Some cheeses weren't ready to eat until stored for several months and the original purpose of cheese, or at least my grand father said was, to store milk from the summer pastures and to make it possible to take it home with you for the winter. Bacon, ham, salt pork, lutafisk, salt cod, salt beef, jerky, pemican, corned beef, etc were all methods of storing meat and fish. Haven't even reached canning, drying, preserving etc, but it seems like our fore fathers at least had the system figured out well enough to have children that survived and lead to us. The Bible tells that things were so desperate that they didn't have time to stop and wait for the bread to rise and had to make matzos. Sounds like they made sure to take the wheat with them when they left Egypt and knew enough to dig up wild horseradish and rob the wild bees to make it taste better.

If you live to year 3 after TSHTF, I doubt if pepper, a lot of spices, and most imported foods will still be on your diet list. For most of us rice will be gone and barley, rye, flax, oats, turnips, wheat, corn, potato ,beans, etc will be our primary winter foods and I can visualize boats on the Mississippi carrying sugar, rum, rice, and tobacco going upstream and coming back with dried meats, wine, beer, hard spirits, vinegar, etc. What will rose hips, lemon juice, black strop molasses and the other vitamin and mineral supplements be worth in the colder states in the late winter?

 

BTDT...Had a chest freezer with lots of meat in it give up the ghost. Cooked it up on the grills, then ate or refroze it. Now there is a spare freezer waiting (yes, it gets tested a couple times a year) in case of another failure. Grid going down is not so much a concern any more.

 

@duane I have these same thoughts. @Gopherman turned me on to moringa trees and a number of other types of food growing. It's why I looked at sprouting. If you are the only one in your area with a garden guess who will get raided when neighbors are hungry...but if the plants I have look like a hedge and are unknown to other people, it's built on nutrition .... (moringa leaves have the highest ORAC value of any plant I have ever seen) I can sprout in the house if my garden gets raided and harvest moringa leaves and most people won't know what they are missing.

 

Hey G
I pruned my moringas back and they are bushing out already after a week. It's almost time for them to set fruits as well. Passion fruit is going insane and flowering like crazy, hopefully we'll get a bunch of ripe fruit this year.
Since I mulched my trees they are all doing great.Still have 20 to go but allthat have the mulch are putting on tons of new growth. I finally figured out what I was missing.

 

This is more industrial than I wanted but it is a good wheat reference. http://www.nebraskawheat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/WheatFromFieldToFlour.pdf

 

Our potatoes are ready to come out of the ground. Golds, whites, reds and blues. Have apples and plums ready to be made into applesauce and jams. Already made a large batch of peach butter from cooler of peaches a daughter gave us. Good luck everyone.

 

I've been playing with preserviing cheese.

soft cheeses like Mozzerella, feta, cream chese can all be preserved for a up to 10 days in an air tight container.... just cover the cheese with oil. If you get mold, the mold will be in the oil and not in the soft cheese.

 

posted today >>> alternative to a full blown root cellar and/or major changes to your basement - bury your veggies in sand

How To Preserve Your Vegetables Using Sand - Ask a Prepper