It’s been awhile since I’ve written about food, but have no fear — we’re still eating! All of the work cleaning, cutting, blanching, and packaging vegetables and fruit really pays off during the winter. We have frozen fruit and basil (oh, the basil!) to last until late spring (and we’re still getting local apples!). We’re rapidly eating our way through the frozen vegetables (we knew we would not have enough to get us through the winter), but we still have a lot of butternut squash.
I highly recommend the butternut squash because it requires approximately zero effort to store — just hang it in mesh bags in the basement (to reduce the bruising that would occur if you just placed it on a shelf), and you’re good to go! Locally grown dried beans, local eggs, and our canned pasta sauce round out the stock piles. Oh, and the potatoes, I almost forgot the potatoes. We have made a big dent in the 200 pounds of potatoes we harvested, but we still have some left. At this point, we’ll be able to plant some of them as seed potatoes for this year’s crop.
Obviously, we’re not eating everything local. I shop at the regular old grocery store for grain (including flours, pasta, etc.) and soy milk. We finished our local onions, so those are a grocery store purchase, also. We’re looking into a source for local, organic, pastured cow’s milk.
We continue to enjoy the monthly winter farmers’ markets. At the January markets, we found unexpected windfalls of fresh spinach (thanks to tunnels, hoop houses, or something of the sort) — this has to be some of the best spinach ever! Anything fresh, green, and local in the middle of January qualifies as special — bring on the salad!
Her Green Life 