One of the things we don’t often touch on are the lifestyle aspects of growing your own food. Some might have entirely different foods or preparations they use during the growing season vs. outside of it. But, it doesn’t have to be that way!
There’s absolutely nothing that says the practices you utilize during the growing season are exclusive to the growing season. While we try to develop our cooking and food preparations around our garden, that doesn’t simply end when our garden is under five feet of snow!
As you can see here, we have a nice fermented sauerkraut from some store bought purple cabbage. Sure, we did use our stored home grown carrots in the preparation, but that was hardly the “crux” of this ferment. Instead of using wild high bush cranberries in the ferment, we had some leftover cranberries (BOGO deal) from our turkey day celebrations. The point is, preservation techniques like fermentation and pickling are practices you can utilize all year long.
We did talk about this last year, but one of the things we’ve tried to focus more on is using relatively “short term” preservation methods. We don’t always need to get into years of storage time, sometimes a few weeks to a couple months is really what we need! Not only is this “short term” food fresher and ultimately better for you, it’s simply a lot more appetizing than your average canned goods.
The concept of maximizing the use of our garden isn’t exclusive to the garden. In this example, we needed a little bit of cabbage for a winter salad that we made awhile back. Instead of simply wasting the rest of that cabbage, we made up a winter sauerkraut with the remainder.
Developing the skillset around utilizing vegetables to their best extents possible benefits not just your garden, but also your “regular” spending that you do at the grocer. It also enables you to use more whole foods effectively. While you can practice these things around making high quality and tasty food, it’s also going help your pocket book during the off season.
Anyway, we’re really digging this rather beautiful, delicious ferment and figured it was a good time to illustrate that many of our methods are viable even in the depths of winter!
