Let’s talk a bit about preservation and how we’ve observed our preferences change over the years.
We’re fairly well versed across all methods of food preservation. We frequently leverage canning, dehydration, infusion, freezing and many of the more obscure food preservation methods. While we love canning for its absolute longevity in keeping foods preserved for long periods, we seemingly find ourselves doing less and less of it every year.
One of the more important things we’ve learned is that we really enjoy being “in the moment” with our food. You could call this cooking with the seasons or just that what we eat tends to focus most on what’s available and in season. But, it’s very apparent that how we eat during the summer months and during the winter are very, very different.
Pickling and fermentation are two skills that we’ve seemingly increased our usage of over the years. We’ve talked about it previously, but often this aims to preserve our foods for “weeks” as opposed to months or even years. For example, these refrigerator pickles capture every bit of “summer” in their taste and freshness, but their shelf life is only about 5 to 6 weeks. These techniques are really focused on “fresh eating.”
While we certainly appreciate, and still do practice long term food preservation like canning, we’ve definitely learned to focus this on “food appropriate” things. For example, things that we’d regularly buy or use, such as diced tomatoes, pickled jalapenos, chutneys and perhaps even some sauces make excellent candidates for canning. Whereas some obscure canned recipe tends to age in our food storage, mostly because we’re not “really” familiar with how to integrate it into our cooking and eating preferences.
But, for something like pickles, we’re perfectly OK with buying a jar of pickles every couple months through the winter. We could certainly can our own pickles, but there’s a lot of rather excellent fresh, “simple-ingredient” commercial varieties out there. When we get our own home made pickles, it’s truly a celebration and something we can truly savor and enjoy. We look forward to it!
We were probably like a lot of people that sought to truly increase our self-sustainability and contribute directly to our own well being. But, there isn’t this unwritten rule that says you have to scarf down 80 jars of canned kale, especially if that’s not something you truly enjoy eating. We think a lot of folks “in our space” (of gardening and food preservation) don’t tend to focus on emphasizing personal preferences and value that your food provides you.
We didn’t truly thrive in our growing and food preservation efforts until we started really focusing on those things that truly make us happy. This is why we focus a lot of our discussion on tuning your garden to your personal preferences and also posts like this, where we do the same thing with our food preservation.
In truth, though, you don’t know any of this for yourself until you do it. So, maybe you do need to can 40 jars of collard greens just to realize that you don’t know how to use it well. We certainly did! Or, you can just listen to our experience and focus on what you truly enjoy, letting your garden and food preservation efforts truly work well for you!
