About one year ago, Chris and I had just picked up our winter storage vegetables and tried to put them away and get them organized and stored appropriately to last all winter. Our house was absolutely stuffed with food, and we decided not to go to the store at all during the winter, except that we would allow ourselves to buy butter, cream, and milk as needed, and occasionally a couple of other items for my son. I started this newsletter to talk about that.
We had no problem at all sticking with that resolution. We had a couple of minor issues, such as running out of white flour. Overall, though, it was so easy, and so nice not to have to worry about buying more food. We had so much canned food and winter storage vegetables and freezers full of meat and such that we never even came close to running out. Food shopping was a task I rarely had to think about.
Last Friday, we picked up this year’s winter storage vegetables, and most of my food preservation is finished. In other words, “the store” — our basement — is restocked.
I also recently signed up for Ali Slagle’s newsletter in which you tell her what is in your pantry and she gives you several ideas for dinner recipes using just what you have. She sent a survey to people who signed up for her newsletter asking what is in our pantries. I haven’t returned it yet because, well, how to explain. I don’t think most people’s pantries look like ours!
So, I thought I’d show off what it looks like and talk about how much food we, as a family of four,1 aggregate to get through winter. It’s going to be an obnoxious display of wealth, to be honest, just not the kind that is really related to having a lot of money.
Let’s start with the food we just picked up at the big stockup sale. Harlequin Produce is one of my favorite farms; their CSA is fantastic, and they roast some of their chiles and red peppers for you, and they also do these two big sales each year that are open to people who aren’t usual CSA subscribers. One is the canning sale in September where you can get cases of tomatoes and large bags of pickling cucumbers, various peppers, and so forth, for your summer canning needs. Then in October they do they winter stockup sale. The basic buy-in to this sale is that you get 100 pounds of produce for $110. They set up a default package, and then you can customize that and also add on other items, generally costing around a single United States dollar per pound. This year, 40 pound boxes of squash were $34 and 18-pound bags of potatoes were $22.50. They also generally still have roasted poblanos and roasted sweet red peppers for your freezer and some salad greens available.
So, we came home from this event with:
35 pounds red beets
35 pounds carrots
30 pounds green cabbage (a winter storage variety, a little drier than early varieties)
50 pounds of yellow onions and 25 pounds of sweet onions (the sweet onions don’t last as long but are tasty)2
144 pounds of potatoes (various types: Yukon gold, Butterball, Terra Rosa, Huckleberry gold)
5 pounds of red shallots (not enough, honestly! glazed shallots are a favorite around here, but we do have 5 pounds of yellow shallots from, idk, somewhere else)
140+ pounds of winter squash (mostly butternut, spaghetti, and sunshine kabocha, but the default package had a mix of squashes including pie pumpkins, so we have a little extra variety)
5 pounds pickling cucumbers
2 pounds roasted sweet red peppers (frozen, and we put them right into our freezer)
4 gorgeous red poblanos that I intend to make
1 large bag salad greens (probably around a pound — and this obviously won’t last all winter, but is a nice little treat)
I think our bill for this was around $550. A lot of money to spend all at once; it makes me anxious saying it out loud. Except — seriously — it’s not even that much for groceries for a family of 4. Of course, it isn’t all of our groceries, just the bulk of our vegetables for the next six months.
They also had, as they often do, a local meat purveyor on site for the event, so we picked up some of her “ugly” bundles (last year’s meats) for a good price as well as some salmon and halibut from Alaska.3 There was also a stand from a local orchard selling apples, apple butter, and wool from their sheep, dyed and undyed. I bought some dyed wool and some Spartan apples.
So, the Harlequin stockup sale is basically one-stop shopping. It’s like going to Walmart except there’s no $5 DVD bin and also you feel happy instead of vaguely queasy after you leave (or is that just my relationship with Walmart?). In addition to the $550 in vegetables that we ordered, we spent about $350 on approximately 35 pounds of meat and fish (sockeye, halibut, grassfed bison, grassfed beef, and pastured pork, about $10/pound for very high-quality meats), $28 on wool and apples, and a bit extra on the red poblanos and an extra pie pumpkin. Considering we will spend very, very little on food throughout the winter, it’s not so much.4
Additionally, our main CSA is still going for a couple more weeks. Today I picked up
5 pounds daikon
5 pounds fennel
75 pounds onions (50 pounds of red, 25 pounds of yellow)
20 pounds of red cabbage
5 more pounds of garlic that honestly we probably did not need but yum
And this stuff:
All told we have accumulated 50-60 pounds of apples to store, 15 pounds of pears, about 5 pounds of parsnips (though I expect the CSA will give us more parsnips before the season is out), 10 pounds or so of Winterkeeper tomatoes (tomatoes bred to be harvested while green and ripen in cold storage; they stay good for a while like that, but will probably be gone by late December or early January). We had also previously acquired, from Harlequin and elsewhere, more onions (50 pounds) and about 120 pounds of various kinds of potatoes. You might think, jeez, 250 pounds of potatoes seems like a lot, but it’s not really for a family of 4, and we will run out before we get tired of eating potatoes.
There are a few other things, I’m sure, that I’m forgetting about, as well as the Brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes we grew, and this is all kept in our cold storage room. We refer to it as “the root cellar” but it’s just a room in our basement that we’ve modified a little, with more modifications planned, to keep it colder than the rest of the basement. It’s a little colder than the squash would prefer and a little warmer than the carrots would prefer, but overall it works.
This is all in addition to all the stuff I canned and fermented this summer: the 100 jars of tomatoes, the gallons of kimchi, and so forth. And, of course, we do have things like salt, peanut butter, cans of coconut milk, and dry goods such as a 50-pound bag of white flour and a 25-pound bag of brown rice that we recently bought at the Amish store yearly customer appreciation sale. We tend to buy a lot of things, not just vegetables, in bulk to cut down on either trips to the store or shipping costs.
Outside of the root cellar, our food storage consists of two refrigerators, three chest freezers, and the rest of the basement.5 One refrigerator is in the kitchen and is the normal sort of family refrigerator, constantly overflowing with leftovers to eat, vegetables I haven’t canned yet, a hundred kinds of mustard, milk, yogurt, etc. We also keep a refrigerator in the barn that we refer to as “the pickle fridge.” I make a lot of our ferments in the summer when our house is hot inside; even in the basement, I struggle to get fermentation to stop at a point where the foods are still palatable. So we bought this extra refrigerator, a very basic model, for the ferments. Because it’s in the barn, it doesn’t run during the winter; the barn is never warm enough in the winter that the refrigerator needs to kick on to stay cold, but the barn also doesn’t get cold enough that all of our pickles freeze. So, it’s a great place to store these ferments, for control over just how fermented they get. The inside looks like this:
As you can see we also keep eggs here and are currently having a bit of an egg crisis, but it’s fine. The produce drawers are full of locally made cheeses. The freezer compartment above this refrigerator generally holds whole grain flours and also nuts; one thing about what I just said about the temperature of the barn in the winter is that things in the freezer compartment do not stay frozen during the winter. They stay very cold, but not literally frozen. It is, however, a very fine temperature for keeping rye flour and black walnuts. Ideally, this refrigerator is empty, or nearly so, by March or April.
Chest freezers are both a blessing and a curse. They’re very efficient, because they don’t leak a lot of cold air when you open them (cold sinks, duh), but they’re also very hard to find things in. We try to keep them organized, but it’s pretty tough, so I often end up planning our meals in the winter not around what we’d like to eat but around what I can find in the freezers. The big one, also in the barn, holds meat, and it will be filled in December; it is about half-full right now, but as I take the chokecherries out to make the chokecherry wine and take the blueberries out to make the blueberry mead and so forth, it will be a lot less full and have room for the big meat orders.
The chest freezer in the basement houses mostly vegetables and some fruits I froze during the summer. The one in the kitchen contains a hodgepodge of breads, flours, butter, nuts, and other things that are convenient to have in the kitchen, including some vegetables such as sliced celery and scallions, that I often use just a little of at a time.
The chest freezers also feel like magic in that, no matter how much food we eat, they never seem to be empty. Some genie somewhere is refilling them while we sleep.
Finally, the rest of our basement outside of the root cellar is where most of the home-canned goods are stored, along with other miscellaneous foods. The pantry houses mostly foods I’d want the kids to be able to find and eat easily, such as peanut butter and jam, condiments, pickles that we eat like salads, canned soups, and, um, the beer and wine?
There is also a hallway in the basement with shelves purpose-built (by Chris) to store jars of canned goods. Under some of the shelves, we have big bins that hold pasta, white rice, and ramen. Don’t laugh about the ramen; we use it in a lot of recipes!
Now that our area has a winter farmer’s market, I might make less effort to acquire all the vegetables we will need to get through winter like this; I might be able to keep shopping from local farms and not have to store so much. But I want to make sure that’s going to last, and I want to be able to stay home from it some weeks if the weather is bad or anyone in our house is sick or anything like that. Or even if I just don’t feel like it. Winter is time for hunkering down, doing craft projects and elaborate baking projects, and sipping hot cocoa while being thankful you don’t have to go anywhere in this weather. I feel this urge to batten down the hatches so strongly that it might be worth doing all this prep work even if it did cost more than buying normal groceries. It doesn’t, though, which makes it all the sweeter.6
Well, a family of four plus several herbivorous pets that also need fresh food during the winter. Our iguana, guinea pig, and five rabbits all love eating locally. Some of these carrots, beets, and cabbages in particular, will end up in their bellies, and then their poops, and then in our garden.
We always store a lot of onions because when you cook from scratch every day, and almost every recipe starts with an onion, do you realize how many onions you use? A lot.
There are a few people who live around here who spend a lot of their summers in Alaska, and a couple of local companies fish in Alaska and bring it back here.
We do have one (or three, depending on how you look at it) last large food expense, and that’s our bulk meats. One lamb, 1/8 beef cow, and a whole hog will add up to nearly $2000, and we’ll add some locally raised chickens to the freezer as well (whole chickens). It’s substantial, but it’s only once per year. These will most likely all happen in December. Pork for Christmas, just like Jesus would have … wait.
Several of us have #10 cans of wheat and beans from the LDS Church under our beds as well, but since we don’t eat those on a regular basis, they’re really more like extra insulation than food storage.
Unless you count time, but I don’t, because I wouldn’t be buying convenience foods at the grocery store anyway. We just don’t really eat packaged foods much, so it’s going to take me time to prep and cook raw foods, no matter where I buy them.