Fresh, Frozen, or Canned?

In my dream world, I walk out to my bountiful garden several times a day and pick whatever we need for the next meal, whether it’s tomatoes, onions, greens, cabbage, herbs, squash, eggplant, beans, corn, almonds, cashews, pecans, walnuts, berries, apples, plums, oranges, lemons, limes, mango, bananas, grapefruit, or passionfruit. All of these things are available year round and crops produce perfect yields, neither too much or too little. Now that is a dream! I would love to have all of those things growing in our yard year round, but like most people in the world the climate and soil type determines what we can grow and when, and the ever-changing weather affects the harvest. Some years we struggle to get enough and some years we have a bounty and store the excess.

When faced with an excess of produce from our garden, we preserve foods by freezing or canning, and each has its own benefits.

Pickled Green Tomatoes.

Freezing

Frozen fruits and vegetables are often nutritionally equal or even sometimes superior to fresh as they are usually frozen just after harvest, locking in the vitamins and minerals that would otherwise leech from the food if stored in the refrigerator or on the counter. Harmful organisms are not destroyed in the process, but the freezing temperature inhibits growth. Some vegetables and fruits can be frozen whole, such as tomatillos and berries, but others should be cut, such as zucchini and carrots. Spread out on a baking sheet the produce you plan to freeze and leave it in the freezer for at least one hour, then put into labeled freezer bags.

Leafy vegetables such as spinach should have stems completely removed. Many vegetables should be blanched or even cooked before freezing, but fruits are often frozen after rinsing clean. Herbs can be frozen as whole leaves or chopped and put into ice cube trays, then frozen. Store the whole frozen leaves in plastic containers and frozen cubes in plastic containers or bags.

Always label everything you freeze with the contents and the date. Storage time for frozen produce varies from 1 to 3 months, but that is based on quality of the product not safety. Properly frozen foods are safe indefinitely.

Frozen basil cubes.

Canning

The canning process applies heat to the food to kill any harmful organisms such as bacteria, molds, and yeasts and destroy enzymes and remove oxygen that break down food. Heat does break down some beneficial vitamins (C, thiamine, folate), but most are stable when heat is applied, so canned foods still have health benefits. Canning at home requires some basic equipment:

• boiling water canner or pressure canner
• jars and lids
• large pot for sterilizing jars and lids

Low acid foods such as vegetables and meats require a pressure canner to ensure the temperatures get high enough to destroy harmful microorganisms such as Clostridium botulinum, so don’t try to just boil them in an open pot. Fruits have enough acid and can be processed in an open pot (the boiling water method). Once you have canned your foods and the lids have properly sealed, they will be shelf stable for up to one year and can be stored without refrigeration until opened.

Canned jams and jellies.

We can pickles, jellies, jams, and fruit butters, and then freeze the rest. Last year we put up about 40 jars of canned goods and froze 5 pounds of tomatillos, several batches of pesto and frozen basil, and then slow roasted and froze about 5 pounds of leftover ripe tomatoes. We have enjoyed the bounty of our summer garden throughout the winter and are looking forward to doing it all over again this summer.

References

National Center for Home Food Preservation

National Center for Home Food Preservation – Freezing

National Center for Home Food Preservation – Canning

WebMD – Frozen Vegetables are Hot

U.S. Food and Drug Administration Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition

USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service – Focus on Freezing

University of Minnesota Extension – How to Prepare Vegetables for Freezing

Beyond Vegetarianism – Effects of Cooking on Vitamins

Andrea’s Recipes – Home Canning (Boiling Water Method)

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This post was written by Andrea

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Nail those Invisible Expenses

With the economic downturn and the increasing number of jobs lost on a daily basis, it is time to take a closer look at our finances. In his article, Peter suggests hiring a financial advisor you can trust to help you improve your return on investment. This is excellent advice especially if money matters make your eyes glaze over and the math drives you nuts. However, the underlying assumption is that you have savings. Living from paycheck to paycheck is not a new or uncommon phenomenon even though all it takes is some common sense to make it a thing of the past.

While we are known to budget for our rent or mortgage, our utilities, our monthly groceries, and perhaps even some living expenses, many of us do not have a handle on how much we spend on a daily basis that drains our savings and therefore our next paycheck. What's eating away your money? Something called your invisible expenses.

You know how cool it is to say how you simply cannot do without your morning cup of coffee from Starbucks? Now add that up and see how much your vanity costs you over the month. You could start making your own coffee every morning. Still have that need to fit in with the rest of the yuppies with next to no savings? Buy the Starbucks cup and fill it up with homemade coffee. Seriously.

Carry a bottle of water with you and start drinking water instead of those sugar-laden sodas or those so-called guilt-free diet drinks that use sugar substitutes. Every time you buy one from that ubiquitous vending machine, you are adding to your invisible expenses. You may spend anywhere from twice as much to four times as much for every purchase you make from these vending machines. If you have a bottle of water, this can be refilled for free from a water fountain and your body will be grateful, too!

Eating out is another invisible expense. You may tell yourself that Subway sandwiches are healthier but are they the right choice for your pocketbook? By the time you leave the restaurant, you have spent nearly $10 each time. And much more over the month. You could pack your own sandwich that morning or the night before or carry leftovers from dinner as your lunch. You could also start a sandwich club with a group of folks from your workplace where you take turns bringing sandwiches for lunch. The sandwich menu changes on a daily basis and you look forward to something new every day. Or delve into the lunch box ideas right here at The Daily Tiffin.

Keep a stash of energy bars or crackers in your desk at work and always make sure that you have something in your purse to tide you over till you make it home. Again, your body will be thankful for your kind consideration!

Movies and popcorn, late night runs for ice-cream, that new mohair sweater, those earrings and trinkets, the magazine on the stand near the checkout counter ... they all add up. As do taxi rides.

Consider making a log of every penny you spend over the course of a month. Or, at least two weeks if an entire month is a daunting prospect. Note how many of those expenses were indulgences, impulsive purchases, or expenses driven by a factor of laziness. Compare this to your monthly budget and see how much you are really spending as opposed to how much you think you are spending.

Make lifestyle changes to cut down on your invisible expenses. It takes a little bit of planning and effort but allows you to manage your money more effectively, with a positive side-effect that you may even start living a little healthier. This is not to say that you must live a frugal life with no frills. Do treat yourself to simple pleasures every once in a while but don't make it a habit, as it will eat into your savings.

The less money you have to spend, the more likely you are to go into credit card debt; and, given today's high APRs, that is not a scenario you want for yourself. One suggestion would be to give yourself a weekly allowance and pay only in cash wherever possible.

It is also the season for gift giving and showing everyone how much you care for them by spending large amounts of money on gifts that they might never use or on gadgets that they can do without. I heard on the radio that Americans spend on an average of $850 per person on gifts at this time of the year. Give your loved ones the best gift you possibly could: an IOU gift certificate for quality time spent together. Or cook a meal for them and bond all over again over the dining table. You could donate money to a local charity or a good cause and send out greeting cards with more information to your friends and relatives, telling them that you donated in their honor.

Stop. Reflect. Think. Plan. And then take action to nail those invisible expenses and wipe them out.

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This post was written by Manisha

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Use, don't waste

What do you do with your veggie scraps? If you don't have a chance to compost them (and thus have organic matter add to the fertility of your soil), don't throw it away!

I keep a huge plastic freezer bag in my freezer, where I collect and save the peel and top ends of carrot, onion tops, the hard outer leaves of fennel or tough celery bits, mushroom stems, cilantro stems, ginger peels, kohlrabi leaves, chicken carcasses, bones from chicken wings or roast duck... when the bag is full I pop all these ingredients into a huge stockpot, adding maybe a few spices and a lot of water - and simmer away, until I have the finest, tastiest leftovers stock you can imagine.

Or what about radish leaves? It didn't dawn upon me that the leaves of tiny red radishes are actually edible (and nutritious) until I found a lovely recipe for a

Potato and Radish Soup

You'll need

350 g potatoes, preferably floury potatoes
100 g carrots
1 yellow onion
1 clove of garlic
30 g butter
600 ml vegetable or chicken stock
250 ml single cream
1 bunch of red radishes, with the greens
2 containers garden cress, snipped
salt
pepper, white if you have
nutmeg, frshly grated

Wash and peel the potatoes, scrub the carrots, peel the onion. Chop the veggies and add the minced garlic.

Heat the butter in a saucepan. Sauté the veggies until the onions are translucent, then add cream and stock an dbring to a boil. Cook, covered, for 15 minutes.

Wash the radish greens and spin them dry. Put aside 5 leaves, chop the remaining greens. For the soup you'll need 6 medium-large radishes, just feed the remaining ones to your family fresh and raw :-) .

Cut the radishes and the 6 leaves into julienne.

Now is the time to blend the soup, either in a blender or better with an immersion blender. Add the chopped radish leaves and the cress from 1 of the 2 containers, blend again. Taste for salt and pepper and season with nutmeg.

Ladle soup into bowls, garnish with radish julienne and leaves and the remaining garden cress.

A handful of sourdough bread croutons, or a slice of your favorite wholegrain bread will round out this delicious meal.


I can tell you I wont be wasting perfectly fine organic radish leaves in the future! - Enjoy!

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This Post was written by Petra from FoodFreak in Hamburg, Germany

Eating better and maybe even saving a buck

Once the care-free days of college were over and the real world began, I encountered the grim realities of a monthly budget. With this in mind, I used to think I was being good by eating lunch at my employer's cafeteria rather than going out to restaurants. While that much is true, it didn't take long to realize that (1) the cafeteria food is awful and (2) I could still do (a lot) better. So, eventually, I started to make my own lunches. When confronted with this new weekly chore, I did what most people would do: I started visiting the deli so I could make sandwiches from the seemingly infinite variety of flavored, sliced meats.

This got me by for quite some time...until Thanksgiving rolled around. With every Thanksgiving, there's turkey (far too much of it), and so for the several days following Thanksgiving, there are many creative ways of repurposing turkey to get through the leftovers before anything spoils. All of us who have done this song and dance have surely had some form of leftover turkey sandwiches and we've all come to appreciate how these are simply some of the best sandwiches you could have all year--moist, flavorful, comforting, and...well, pretty cheap! Then, we all just as quickly run out of leftovers and never have it again until next year. Why?

As soon as I had to return to deli meat, I was disappointed and wondered if this is what I had been eating all along--it was so bland, loaded with sodium, and well...its kind of slimey (blech!). I wanted more turkey, and I mean real juicy, flavorful, meaty turkey! And so this began a new era of lunches for me--I swore off deli meat. I just kept buying turkeys, roasting them, shredding the meat (no thin, slimey deli slices for me!), and freezing them in week's-worth-of-sandwiches sized portions, defrosting a bag each weekend as I needed. Using one bird, I could have sandwiches for 4-5 weeks--talk about minimal effort and cheap! Of course, eventually, one just might get tired of turkey (and they can be a bit harder to come by throughout the year), so then I simply switched to roasting whole chickens (which cover about 2 weeks of sandwiches for me).

This whole process is amazingly simple--rub a bird with some oil/butter, salt, pepper, and whatever other seasonings suit your fancy, roast it until cooked through in a roasting pan (much easier than disposable tins, I promise!) in your oven, let cool a bit, and then shred up every last bit of meat, promptly freezing what you won't get to right away. In total, this probably costs you about 30 minutes of your focused time in the kitchen (not even once a week), saves you money (compare $/lb for a bird vs deli meat), and tastes so much better than deli meat. Multiply this by every working week throughout the year, and this adds up. All you need to do each week is thaw out the meat and assemble your sandwiches as you normally would.

This got me thinking about my other meals and how I could not only improve them, but save money in the process. Why not make my own granola bars for breakfast rather than buying pre-made, for instance? Or starting a simple herb garden rather than shelling out $2+ for a small bunch every week? Using the frequently roasted bird carcasses/drippings as a base for stock rather than buying by the can? Or eating with the seasons and local specialties in mind? Buying chicken thighs instead of boneless breasts? Whipping small amounts of leftover cream to use as whipped cream rather than buying a big can I'll never get through? So many admittedly small things, but done all together, the savings really do add up week to week.

Do you, reader, have any tips or tricks for things you fall back on in the kitchen to make your food money go further? I'd love to hear from you.

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This Post was written by Mike from Mike's Table

Love Food, Hate Waste

The recently launched Love Food, Hate Waste website reminded me that here in the UK, a third of the food we buy ends up being thrown away. Most of this is food that can be eaten, not just banana skins and tea bags.

For every three bags of food we carry home, we are effectively dropping one straight into the bin. As well as being a waste of money this is also a huge waste of resources.

As we approach Christmas, a time when many of us are buying more food than usual, it is particularly important that we think about how to ensure that we are not wasting food


Plan your meals and shop accordingly
Normally, keeping your cupboard and fridge stocked with the basics, and knowing what is in them and your freezer, is the best way to ensure that you can pull a meal together. Keeping an eye on best before dates and checking how your fruit and vegetables are every few days so you can use them up when they are at their freshest and ripest is also critical. For many of us there is no need for strict menu-planning.

However, during the festive season, when we often want to eat particular foods on particular days, planning meals becomes really important, both to ensure we shop for what we need but also to avoid waste.

Make a timetable and mark in the special meals that you want to cook and eat. Think about which of these are likely to result in leftovers and then work out how you can use these leftovers to make other dishes, not forgetting smaller meals when a sandwich or bowl of soup will be more than enough.

If you have gaps in your menu planner slot some of these in. If there aren’t enough gaps, think about which leftovers can be frozen for use another day. For example, if you are having turkey on Christmas Day you can freeze the carcass to make stock or, if you have the time, make and freeze the stock itself.

When you are shopping, obviously you’ll want to have some treats to hand for snacking on but don’t go over the top. So many festive meals are large and rich and those extra cakes, chocolates or nuts that you buy really aren’t going to get eaten. Or if they are it is just because they were there which is always a waste of calories!

Get your portion sizes right
When planning special meals it is so easy to get carried away. If you are anything like me, you write a list of everything that you traditionally have, add on a few of your new favourites and then an extra something, “just in case.”

Try and restrain yourself! If there are only two of you, that festive roast really doesn’t need six different vegetable accompaniments plus two types of potato dish as well as the usual trimmings of pigs in blankets, stuffing, bread sauce and Yorkshire puddings! Or if you can’t bear to cut back on the number of dishes, make smaller portions, particularly of those things that won’t freeze/work well as leftovers.

Think about eating your meals over an extended period of time. A mid-morning Christmas glass of something celebratory would be lovely with smoked salmon blinis, taking away the need to do a more formal starter. Similarly, your choice of pudding can easily be eaten an hour of two after your main course. This approach also helps your body digest the larger-than-usual amounts of food that many of us will be eating.

Think about smaller, lighter meals for the days when you’ll have already overindulged. Simple vegetable soups – using up some of those extra veggies you inevitably bought – are a lifesaver. And if you do cook too much of anything, portion it up and put it in the freezer.

Think about storage
Think about how you can store your food so that it lasts as long as possible. The Love Food, Hate Waste has some great tips about this as well as how to rescue foods that are becoming past their best.

It’s also important to be realistic about how much space you have and what space is needed for the festive food that you are planning to buy. If you have a garage think about using this for keeping drinks and vegetables cool, only bringing them in when you need them.

Fridges and freezers become particularly pressured at this time of year, so have a sort out and remove any items that are out of date or really don’t need to be in there. Using up almost empty jars can clear lots of valuable space. This weekend is a good time to go through your freezer and plan a few meals for next week that will use up large bulky items that could be cleared to make space.

And when you’ve done all of that, it’s time to think about how your saved pennies can be put to better use…

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This Post was written by abby from eat the right stuff

Eating everything on your plate

If you're anything like me, and if your parents were anything like mine, then you probably have a major fear of wasting food.

In theory, eating everything on your plate sounds like good economics, but it's not good if you're calorie counting. The thing is, eating the last bites of your kid's chopped up hot dog is not doing anyone any favors, except maybe the person who collects dues at your gym. Consider this: 1/4 of a hot dog is 45 calories and 1/4 of an easy mac package is 57 calories, both of which you are just meaninglessly eating. So steer clear and if it's just too tempting, then give your kids less on their plate and when they ask, give them more.

If you are noticing that you yourself constantly have leftover food on your plate when eating out, then try ordering kids meals or bringing what you can't eat home for leftovers. Since restaurant portions can be huge, try to just eat half of your entrée and save the rest for tomorrow's lunch. This way you probably won't feel bogged down by a heavy meal and you just might have room for dessert.

Also, if you buy something and don't like it, then don't eat it just because you feel like you should. Afraid of wasting? Start composting, it's a great way to throw out food without feeling terrible about it. Still worried about the kids starving in Africa? Then instead of stuffing your face on their behalf, donate money to charitable organizations like ONE, the campaign to make poverty history.

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This Post was written by Susi May from FitSugar