I started this project a bit over a year ago, when my husband and I realized that, after our final winter stock-up from the local farms, we had too much food in the house and vowed not to bring anymore in during the course of winter. We made just a few exceptions, for things that are necessary to how we eat but difficult to stock up on, such as fresh milk. At the end of that winter, when CSA season and all that would be starting up again, we still had too much food in the house, but we were definitely better off than we were at the start of it.
What and how we eat are fairly seasonal. We live in northwestern Montana, so we have what we might call Real Winter here, a time when there is not a lot of fresh food to be had, although fresh local dairy products and eggs and local (frozen) meats are still available. For winter eating, we stockpile storage crops, such as potatoes, squash, carrots, and apples, and we also can and freeze as much of our local summer’s bounty as we can, including food from local farms, our own yard, and things we forage. We freeze, ferment, can, and dehydrate all summer — though mostly in August and September, because some “summer” crops are really only available in Montana during those months — to supplement our diets. We choose which preservation strategy to use based on what the food is and what kind of use we will hope to make of it during winter.
We live in a small town, so we don’t have acreage or anything, nor really the will to work that much land, but we have a good sized yard and we have devoted much of our yard space to food-bearing perennials. Right now, our yard is bursting with fresh chives, green garlic, bunching onions and perennial onions, sorrel, rhubarb, dandelions, and parsley that isn’t perennial but we allow to reseed itself so that it is growing wildly. All these fresh green flavors are very welcome after a long winter.
We have a lot of fruit-bearing shrubs and trees (that we prune to be dwarfed, so we can fit more varieties) throughout our yard. Just now, the golden currants are in bloom, and we’re hoping, since it’s warm, they will be sufficiently pollinated that we’ll have a good crop this year. The best use for the golden currants is dehydrated, to be used in oatmeals and scones and that kind of thing all year. We also throw a number of them to the chickens, who make eggs for us most of the year. We’ve only planted most of these shrubs and trees within the last couple of years, so they aren’t all producing yet, but we expect within just a few more years to be mostly self-sufficient in fruit, with the possible exception of peaches and nectarines. This year we expect to harvest honeyberries, raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, currants, and cherries from right here in our yard.
We try to spend as much of our grocery budget buying local food as we can. We buy all our meat from local ranchers; we are fortunate to even buy nearly all our fish from local fisheries, due to our proximity to Flathead Lake. We buy milk from local folks who have just a few head of cows or goats and treat them well. Essentially all of our vegetables and fruits are sourced locally. Our wheat, rye, oats, and most of the beans we eat are not quite local; most of them are grown in the Rocky Mountain Front region of Montana, which is on the other side of the Rockies from us — not too far, really, as the eagle flies but the grains have to come to us over roads, rather than on the backs of eagles, unfortunately. We buy rice and pasta and a few other things, such as soy sauce, peanut butter, and coconut milk, from far away, but it’s pretty limited.
While I sort of like to cook, I am not exactly a foodie and this isn’t exactly a food blog and I am by no means a recipe developer. I often do not want to cook. Last night it came to be time to make dinner and I hadn’t been outside all day, on such a lovely spring day, and I didn’t want to cook, and I was cursing my lot. Why do I care so damn much about this? It’s a burden I have put on myself, because of things I believe about ecology and industrialization, the device paradigm and ethics, beauty and community. I ended up opening two jars of curried meatballs that I canned last October and adding them to some sauteed onions and potatoes with a can of coconut milk and some Goan masala. We ate it over brown rice. On the side we had both mashed squash (we still have a few left, and I’m very tired of eating them) and a jar of cauliflower pickled with cumin and fennel from last summer. For dessert, we ate strawberries from our own garden, dutifully frozen last summer, with whipped cream. The only thing that came from more than 60 miles away was the rice — and the spices. Dinner only took a half hour or so to prepare, thanks to all the work I’d already done, so we could get outside after dinner.
This week I am hoping to can turkey broth, made with remnants we’ve been saving in the freezer for a while; to pick violets and make a violet flavored simple syrup, which we use in lemonades and teas, cakes and candies; and to get some dandelion greens into the freezer. I hope to make dandelion (flower) fritters for lunch tomorrow and also a kimchi-type ferment out of dandelion greens and chives. The new year of food preservation is just beginning, though as I said it doesn’t really get out of control until August.
I tried to fill out Ali Slagle’s list of 40 ingredients1 I always have on hand, but it’s pretty difficult for us. It’s easy to list meats, cheeses, eggs, and pantry items like spices and seasonings or carbs like pasta, but for vegetables? Canned tomatoes is the only thing we always have, year-round, without fail. We have kale, fresh or frozen, for most of the year, I would say, and we have bulb onions and potatoes for most of the year, but not all of it. We inevitably run out of last year’s before this year’s crops start coming in. We use chives and bunching onions and the greens of perennial onions and garlic that we leave in the ground as our main alliums, from roughly May through July or so. Those aren’t quite the same as bulb onions and garlic, for recipe purposes.
Because I homeschool my younger son (mainly — my older son is preparing to go off to college and welding school in January, and he’s mostly done with “homeschool” now) and we have a lot of animals2 and plants to manage, plus the usual adult-householder things to do, it became untenable for me to work full time, and it’s difficult for me even to find time to write. My husband works full-time as a computer programmer, and also does all he can to help me find time to read and write to keep me feeling sane and whole. Usually each of my sons cooks one night per week, and Chris (my husband) cooks one night per week, and usually we go out to eat one night per week at the local burger-joint-slash-bar. So it seems like I only cook three nights per week, and how hard can that be, but I also cook lunch for us most days, and most of the times when my sons cook, I am in there with them to help and teach them. Part of the reason for this is that I have to teach them how to adapt everything to what we actually have at that time, rather than strictly relying on us having what the recipe asks for.
Right now the elder teen is in the kitchen making meatloaf and has listened to “Dancing Queen,” “Amos Moses,” some Japanese song, and Sinatra’s version of “New York, New York” in the last several minutes. It’s quite a playlist he has going. I need to look at an essay he wrote as a practice at writing timed essays, and then I need to grade my younger son’s algebra and grammar work, then give the small dog her evening insulin shot, can the turkey broth, and I was hoping to bake some pumpkin cookies with the leftover squash from last night, because like a little sweet thing with our coffee in the morning. There’s a lot to do, and it’s constant.
I usually publish our meal plans for each week, although we don’t always adhere very strictly to them. They are geared toward using up what we have in a timely manner. When you eat like this, because you shop like this, because you believe in this, making the meal plan itself is a chore. But if you fail to do it, then it’s too easy to let the squash simply rot in the basement because you failed to plan for enough time to cook them. Or you forget about the beets, or the parsnips, or, if it’s in a better season, you forget to use up the beautiful farmer’s market lettuce or something. I mean, we would never, of course, but I hear that it happens.
A lot of my writing here revolves around food, but some of it — and more of it in the future — is about other aspects of our life: community, ecology and ethics, children and animals and other wild things, and sometimes just about books I’m reading or what I’m thinking about and who I want to become. For me, these are all part of a whole. What I cook is because of who I am, in every sense, and what and how we eat is informed by every other part of our lives.
Ali Slagle’s is a Substack I happily pay for. Her recipes are great and very real, and I think the concept is wonderful. It doesn’t actually fit my life very well, due to our rotating supplies, but her recipes tend to be pretty adaptable, and she is generous with giving substitution ideas.
We have four Angora rabbits my younger son hopes to harvest fur from; one guinea pig; two kittens, one of whom is a nihilist; two dogs, one of whom is diabetic and blind and the other of whom is merely very anxious; five chickens plus three new pullets and one little turklet (Thanksgiving dinner, most likely); and one iguana, for some reason. It’s just … a lot.