I've been asked before what foods and how much we can for our family of three. Canning our own food is one of the ways we save on our grocery bill, and I'd say it's one of the biggest ways we're able to cut down on grocery store expenses. By having a variety of foods in our pantry, we have a selection to choose from to give variation to our meals. We have a few staple meals for wintertime that simply require a walk down the basement steps, some spices, and maybe a few simple ingredients like butter or milk to go with it. While at times I prefer a bit more variety in my meal plan than what we've been able to grow so far, I never have to go shopping for side dishes. I could stand to be a little more creative using what we do have, but when I set down and make a point to cook from on-hand stock, I find it often isn't much of a challenge. As I've said before, as long as I have butter, milk, and eggs on hand, we can eat pretty well staying away from the grocery.
Our goal in doing our own gardening and canning is more than just keeping our food budget low. We want to eat healthy and become as self-sufficient as possible, not depending on conventional farming via the store to feed our family. This year we took the "eating healthy" part up a notch, and decided we were going to cut out sugar and white flours from our home cooking. This meant purchasing a 5-gallon bucket of honey locally and using it to sweeten our pickles and ketchup. This decision came shortly after strawberry season, where I accidentally misread my notes and added 3x more sugar than I did the previous year. We already had been keeping our sugar consumption low, and multiplying it by 3x what we did before still kept it less sweet than what you'd find in Walmart, but that was a big oops nonetheless.
You'll notice in my chart below that some of the later-season crops weren't recorded very well. In 2015, I had just given birth to Adam and paused my canning for a couple weeks, had others helping me with it, and well, I just didn't do so well keeping track. This year even though I tried harder, I still forgot to record some of the squash and broths as well as I would've liked.
Our garden yield wasn't quite as good in some areas as I was hoping (partially due to no rain, and lots to do with my laziness), but thankfully we had enough canned goods from last year that I really only needed to add a few things that we were getting really low on. I think ketchup was the only thing we absolutely ran out of from the 2015 canning season. This next year I'm going to need to pay attention that I get salsa and pizza sauce, as we only have a few more jars of each. I have a few gallons of whole tomatoes that I stuck in the freezer to process this winter, and need to get to them still. I am out of plain tomato sauce pints, so I figure I'd use them up that way so I don't have to be opening quart jars when I only need half of it for my recipe. It's easier to waste food when I stick the remainder in the fridge and don't have a plan for the other half of the jar.
Last year we planted two varieties of potatoes and had loads of them to last us all the way through until summer. This year we planted two varieties again, but were only able to get one of them harvested due to not being able to get our tractor into a very wet garden. That was really disappointing for me, because my husband grows the most delicious potatoes I have ever set my teeth into. The ground didn't freeze until much later than normal this fall, but that still didn't help the fact that it was rather swampy out there until then! The one variety we did get was a red potato, and I think we both decided from now on we're only going to plant that kind. Not only was the flavor really sweet, but the very first potato Aaron dug this summer was bigger than his hand! We chopped it up and made a huge panful of fries, and both ate to satisfaction from ONE potato. That one ended up being the biggest of the crop, but there were a whole bunch that weren't far behind. It has been nice not having to deal with a bunch of littles! I still have a few pounds in the basement, and figure they should last us another month or so, depending what we decide to cook and if we can stay faithful keeping the eyes from getting out of hand. This year was an early one for them to start sprouting eyes for some reason.
Besides all that, I still have a few more pounds of beef bones to cook down for broth, and would like to turn some of our applesauce into apple butter. Aaron loves apple butter, and with as much jam as we consume in a year, it would be nice to have one more option to accompany our bread. Also, I would like to mention this list isn't everything we plant in our garden, just what we stored for the winter. We always plan on extras for fresh summer eating. So now you have it ... this is what we've stocked up the past two years! Not much longer before it's time to plan our garden of 2017.........
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