Canning and Preserving Food - A Family Affair

As a child, one of the memories etched in my mind was the late summer and early fall canning of ripe peaches and pears, and the later fall canning of chunky applesauce.  Sometimes there was late summer canning of tomato juice or stewed tomatoes.  Occassionally there was the making and canning of fragrant, deep purple grape juice, made from Concord grapes.  My Mom was in charge, and did this annual food preservation well and with skill.  The results were outstanding.  Come the end of fall, the fruit room in the basement was lined with jars of preserved food, to be eaten through the fall, winter and often into the next summer.

There is a serious question to be asked of why someone would actually go through the process of canning, or otherwise preserving food, when satisfactory food can be easily purchased at a grocery store.  The answer to that question is intensely personal, and not the same for each individual.  Some would say that it is simply not worth the time and effort, or other priorities trump the ideal of home food preservation.

My answer to that question is multi-faceted.  First, I put food away in order to know how to do it and to know how to care for myself and my family.  I put food away because I can control the ingredients and the recipes toward the ends of a better, more healthy, more tasty outcome.  I also put food away to be prepared.  The preparedness is along a number of dimensions, including easily preparing a meal from food on hand, having food on hand for weather or other natural "emergencies," and having food on hand to be prepared in the event of economic issues.  Those economic issues can relate to my direct family, or the families of my children as they spread their wings and make their way in this journey of life.  I don't do it because someone told me to.  I do it because it makes sense to me to do it.  And if you didn't catch it already, it simply tastes better.

I learned to can at my Mom's side.  I mostly watched, but sometimes I got my hands in on the action and clumsily tried to peel peaches and pears, while halving and pitting or coring them.  I always worried that I was destroying these fragile, delicious fruits, but Mom was always, always patient.  The water bath canner would hold seven quart jars.  I would get one jar done and Mom would get six jars done.  She was better at this than I was or am.

I was lucky enough to have my Mom hand write her recipe for peaches, pears, and applesauce.  She has the most beautiful handwriting.  This scanned recipe was written probably 25 years ago.  The paper is yellowed and there are food spots and other things on the recipe.  It is precious to me.  I hope you will treasure it as well.  For peaches and pears, this is a very light syrup, which lets the natural flavor of the fruit shine.  For those of you concerned about glycemic index and the potential impact of syrup packed fruit, my experience is that eating one or two halves of a peach or pear, without the syrup, canned this way has no perceptible impact on blood sugar.

SCAN OF MOM'S RECIPE

Michelle and I have both taken the lead at times in canning and other food preservation.  Sometimes we do it together.  Sometimes we do it with the kids.  Sometimes we do it with friends.  Sometimes we do it alone.  The key is that we do it.  Simply doing it hits on my first point of why I can and preserve foods.  I know how to do it and I keep my skills honed.  There is virtue in knowing how to do stuff.  We are losing our ability to do stuff.  Learn how to do stuff and teach your kids, teach your friends, and teach the friends of your kids and your friends.

When canning peaches and pears, we always use my Mom's recipe.  It works well, the kids like it, and we like it.  Enough said.

Canning in the kitchen in August and September is a hot affair.  The idea that the pioneers had of a summer kitchen makes a lot of sense.  Keep the heat out of the kitchen where you live.  An ideal is to have an outdoor kitchen that can be used in part for summer and fall canning.

Michelle has canned spaghetti sauce and salsa with her friends using a pressure canner, which is required for low acid foods.  Whoever thought of spaghetti sauce and salsa as low acid?  Well, it's on the margin because of all of the non-tomato content in these foods.  For safety's sake use a pressure canner.  In those events, Michelle and her friends would gather together and prepare and can these foods.  Canning as friends is a great way to learn, teach, build skills, have fun, and make some good food.

For grape juice, we have used a steam juicer as part of the processing.  It makes much of the process easier, and yields tasty, wonderful grape juice that may or may not require other processing, depending on which recipe you are following and the care taken.

A favorite at our house is freezer jam.  Oregon strawberries are the best.  None of those California grown flint stone strawberries for our jam.  Raspberry jam is a favorite.  We have dabbled in Marionberry jam as well.  Marionberries are a locally developed trailing blackberry variety.  They are incredibly delicious.  Sometimes I call them "crack berries" because they are so addictive.  All of the deliciousness may be called into question when you read the recipe for freezer jam, but only momentarily.  The sugar content is outrageous.  Our freezers are generally very well stocked with freezer jam, which are delicious above and beyond anything, I repeat, anything you can find at the store.

Another serious question is whether or not canning is an optimal, or even good form of food preservation.  As a teen, I started to wonder whether or not the sugar often used in canning was good for you, not that I cared much, but I wondered.  Learning about the adverse health impacts of what Dr. Weston Price called, the "foods of commerce," which included canned goods, sugar, white flour, I wondered about the place of canned goods in a healthy diet.  I determined that fresh foods were better and that lacto-fermented foods (e.g. real pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi) were oustanding as well.  I have learned that properly dehyrated foods had an important place in food storage as well.  I have determined that there is a real and important place in a healthy diet for canned foods, particularly if you can control the recipes.  It is reassuring to look at the canned goods on the shelf and realize they will be there if you have unexpected guests, if the power goes out, or if you just want to reach back and taste that delicious peach or pear of summer.

Back to the Portland Area - Sequent, an Apartment, and Our First House

As is often the case with startup companies, my adventure at Proficiency did not end with long term employment.  Lack of traction in the marketplace and an increasingly reluctant funding source led to the reorganization and closure of the company.  There was good news on the horizon at the time.  The manager, that hired me at Tektronix, John Jonez, had moved to a different company in Beaverton, Sequent Computer Systems.  When he was aware that I was looking for work, he pulled out all the stops and helped me land a job back in the Portland area.  In a very real sense, we felt like we were heading home.

We found an apartment in Hillsboro that we liked very much.  When we moved in, we were three.  When we moved out, we were four.  The apartment had nice amenities like a swimming pool, which Michelle and Kirsten used regularly.  We had a washer and dryer in the apartment.  It was located convenient to the grocery store, the library, and other things.  But, like most people, we wanted a house.

We moved into our first house in the summer of 1992.  That year, drought had hit the Willamette Valley.  There were watering restrictions on the watering of lawns.  The lawns went dormant during that summer.  We were allowed to water trees, bushes and flowers.  Related to the watering restrictions, there was one thing that I learned, which would become more important over time.  In the brown fescue and ryegrass lawn, there were bright green plants.  I wondered why the lawn went dormant but there were three plants in particular that stayed green, even in the heat and dryness of the summer.  I know two of the plants, I don't know the third.  The two that I know are dandelion and chickory.  The third looks like a close relative of dandelion.  All three had deep tap roots.  They could reach one to two feet down in the soil to find moisture, whereas the grass was limited to about three or four inches of root depth.  This became relevant as I considered pasture plants for non-irrigated pastured in the Willamette Valley.

Another thing I learned at our first house related to the cycling of nutrients through the grasses and soil of the lawn.  Most people bag their lawn clippings, and along with it, their soil fertility, and send them off to the dump or yard debris recycling center.  The process of bagging the lawn clippings and sending soil nutrients away created the necessity of bringing in soil nutrients from elsewhere.  This is why people who send their lawn clippings away have to bring in fertilizer in order to maintain vigor in their lawns.  I learned that using a mulching lawn mower cycles the soil nutrients right in place, greatly diminishing the need to fertilize your lawn. The soil nutrients move into the grass plants, then are chopped up and decompose, returing to the soil to be utilized again by the grass.  That is quite an oversimplification, but you get the general idea.  I read about natural lawn care and how a long cut lawn would be rewarded with deeper penetrating roots, which would allow for the use of less frequent watering and potentially less overall water applied.  Additionally, long cut grasses, would shade out some of the plants that would normally be considered weeds.  In effect, I learned several important unorthodox principles.  Use a mulching mower instead of sending your lawn clippings away.  The lawn clippings feed to soil life and biology, ultimately cycling back to the grass.  Minimize your offsite fertilizer inputs.  Cut your grass long to minimize weeds.  Minimize, or don't use herbicides to protect your kids and pets, as well as that soil life that recycles your lawn clipplings.  Herbicides kill the soil bacteria and fungi.  These are things you don't learn from the Scott's or Ortho marketing materials.  I had become a lawn heretic.

The lot that the house was on was small.  The entire back yard was maybe 20' by 50'.  Nearly a quarter of that was a patio and perhaps another quarter was covered with 1-2" river rock.  The front yard was larger than the back yard.  There was a nice red maple in the front yard.  In the back yard, there were two Asian pear trees.  I was delighted by the Asian pear trees.

I was introduced to Asian pears during my time in Korea.  I had never seen or tasted one prior to going to Korea.  I found the Asian pears to have a mixture of characteristics between an apple and a pear, as I knew them.  They were sweet like a Bartlett pear, and crisp like an apple.  Aside from the crispness, the texture seemed to be a cross of an apple and a pear.  In Korea, people would usually peel the Asian pears, prior to eating.  I found that it really depended on the variety.  Some varieties had thick skins that were not that enjoyable to eat.  Others had thinner skins that were fine to eat.  You see similar variations in apples.  The Asian pear trees were a wonderful novelty, but soon outgrew the small backyard.  Reluctantly I took them down after a few years.  It seemed like a sin.  In retrospect, it probably was a sin.  I didn't know enough about taking care of fruit trees to know what I could have done differently at the time.

The size of the backyard, dictated no real room for a garden.  I could have put two or three raised beds in the front yard, but at the time, I thought that no one would put vegetables in the front yard.  The conformist thinking of my previous experiences told me that was unacceptable.  Walt Whitman said, "Re-examine all you have been told.  Dismiss what insults your soul."  I suppose the idea of keeping vegetables out of the front yard, in order to be "proper," insults my soul, so I reject that idea now as a valid construct.  Later I found that many of the "Victory Gardens" of the World War II era were kept right in the front yards of the suburbs.  Now many Home Owner Associations prohibit the vile deed of planting vegetables in your front yard.  I have heard said that Home Owners Associations are for people who just don't have enough government in their lives.

Our first house was a wonderful house.  It got us through our Sequent years.  We have many fond memories from that house, but it was limited in space, both inside and out.