Winter Food Prepping

Prepping is something that is coming back into popular fashion, which is a good thing!

For those of us that can't really grow a decent bit of food due to one reason or another, one of the important things that we can do is support our local farms through what is known as a Community Supported Agriculture program, or CSA for short. This program is an excellent thing where you sign up with a farm, give them a specific bit of money and they give you a size box of food depending on what one you got. This has so many benefits for us, but one of the important ones is that it gives us the chance to store food for the winter, while also getting things for eating right now!

The local farms that we've got where we live have done a wonderful job of making their CSA programs pretty popular, it's not really something that we heard much about when I was growing up but over the last 10 years or so, the concept has really taken off! It's such an amazing thing and absolutely one of the ways that we can take the power back locally instead of giving it to massive agricultural companies.

The farms that we get our food from have been supplying us with loads of delicious goodies over the past several months and towards the end of September is when the shares were starting to get really heavy and packed with things that are great to store for longer periods of time like the winter. This is when we start getting things to stockpile our freezer so that we have good food throughout the colder months, and food that we already paid for during the summer and fall!

One of the things that I've been meaning to do is get better at canning things. There are certainly various ways to can and pickle things and I gave this one a try here with onions. I don't love raw onions, but I figured it's good to give it a try and pickle it to see what happens! The recipe was incredibly simple, just vinegar, water and salt. The crucial thing about it is that you need to make sure you are using 5% acidity vinegar, otherwise the pickling won't be safe to eat!

To the main course though, the delicious veggies that we were getting! I spent a day cutting all of the things up a few weeks ago and really went to town on packing the things into little baggies and making it so that everything is as easy and accessible as it can be, so that when the time comes to use it, just take out the bag, pop it in the Instapot with spices, broth, water and meat and you're good to go! This has been a staple for me over the past year or two, where we froze a lot of our food and it allowed us to save some money but also eat healthier because we weren't buying more store processed foods or takeout.

This has a number of benefits of course, and there are a few people here on Hive but plenty on the web as a whole who advise it's best to store as much food as we can so that we get in the habit and cycle of keeping food for later. This is how families got through famines and economic depressions, where they had gardens and also the storage for all kinds of food. The more self-reliant we can be, the better!

I kicked it up a notch with these bags, in that I added a bunch of dried beans and lentils to them. I am more of a fan of the beans over the lentils but these are both great things to add calories and proteins to our diets which goes a long way in the colder months. The more that we can gain in terms of calories, health calories of course, in a meal when the weather is pretty damn cold, the better we will be overall!

We've now got a freezer chock full of delicious and fresh foods! It's kind of funny because we are getting more food from a late-season CSA program that we signed up for, so we are trying to cut that up and use that as well but it's harder to do that with a freezer already pretty much stuffed! I know those are definitely good problems to have haha.