Oh--with those fresh berries, what about doing up fruit puree to pour over pancakes or waffles? We also do fresh fruit in plain yogurt. And, if they're getting to the point of "yikes, I don't want them to turn on me!", pop the fruit on a baking tray and flash freeze them, then bag them for use later. We do smoothies with yogurt, bananas, frozen fruit, and milk.

If you're up for a baking session, you could also do berry muffins, and wrap those for freezing and eating later.

I'm SOOOOOOOOO looking forward to getting closer to spring and planting. I'm ready for the snow to be done! And in just three or four short months, it will be!

Went to Costco today (what else would I do on my day off, Valentine's Day??) and loaded up on nice apples, mandarins, prawns and two bottles of sauvignon blanc. Dinner with DH tomorrow night! If I have time tonight, I'll make a cheesecake.

I make a sauce with blueberries or strawberries for a sauce for ice cream or pancakes (alittle bit of water, sugar, berries, cinnamon, lemon juice/zest.

Elizabeth, thanks for the explanation. I guess the quantities do add up over time. One reason to shop at intervals is that we could never store it all for a year, nor would we pay for everything at one time.

Do you can ALL the food you eat - that isn't fresh? I assume that in season, you eat mostly fresh produce.

You can meat, too?

You bake your own bread?

WHEN do you have time to breathe? Along with home-schooling, doing some kind of pattern work, running a blog, doing historical lectures/teaching/something like that, and some printing/publishing here and there, plus church, etc. ?????

I realize that pioneer women did a lot of these same things, and had fewer modern conveniences. That's surely where "a woman's work is never done" came from. Even with the conveniences, I'm amazed how hard it can be to keep up with running a home. True, there is more to do now in some respects (in the 1800's, women didn't have to work on taxes, for instance), and, if one works outside the home and commutes, less time to do it in. Indeed, I'm sure that, to give one example, microwaves were developed to help speed dinner along, rather than have it late at night after the wife/mother got home from work.

Nevertheless, I'm still impressed with all you do.

Other GONers who do canning and other things, such as crafts, I'm impressed with you, too.

Yup, the kids love the purees over the pancakes.

Last night I made the surprise dessert of chocolate crepes filled with chocolate mousse and raspberry sauce. Very decadent. I made the sauce from from frozen raspberries, and then strained it. YUMMY!

There was enough left over for DH to take three servings to work. Two years ago, there were four men at his work. Now he's down to him and the principal. One of the other guys is returning to substitute so the "guys" get to have coffee and dessert.

I'm slowly emptying the freezer of last years strawberry crop. I still have several bags of rhubarb in there as well. I know that there is some vanilla ice cream, so next week I would like to make a strawberry rhubarb sauce to put over the ice cream.

DD is a berry fiend. If I don't monitor her, she'd only eat berries. It is a wonderful problem to have.

Simplicity: Yep.

To be fair, I've not done full-scale canning in several years. But yes, I grew up doing a lot of home preservation (my mother, grandmother, and aunt are all epic gardeners), including canning meats. It's not difficult, but one does have to own a pressure canner, and not everyone has those (I had one as part of my "congrats, now you're a grown-up" kit).

We did a lot of canning when we lived in the Pacific Northwest, as losing power for a week or more at a time was not that uncommon in the winter (gales off the ocean that don't get called hurricanes because they don't swirl much, but the wind speeds can be similar). Shelf-stable meats work better than freezer-dependent things in those situations, since we had non-electric means of cooking.

It's a grand convenience to pop open a pint of home-canned meat, add a few pints of veggies, a few fresh potatoes, and sit down to stew in 40 minutes or less. Or, shred home-canned beef with a bit of cheese and green chili sauce, and have "instant" shredded beef tacos. One of my favorites is "instant" chicken & noodles: quart of boneless chicken and broth, quart of plain chicken stock, pint of carrots, fresh onion & celery, and a packet of frozen homemade egg noodles, dumped in a pot and heated through. Tastes like you simmered all day, took 10 minutes to assemble.

The price difference, once you own jars, is amazing. Even if we buy the beef at $4 a pound, we can make our own home-canned meats for less than 1/3 of the retail price on canned meats. (Growing up, we even did canned fish... DH is not a fan, so we don't do that now.)

In the last few years, we have not canned all our own fall/winter/early spring foods. I missed it! The flavor is fantastic, we get to really tailor things to our own likes, and because we either grow it ourselves, or buy it cheap from local growers when it's in peak season, the cost is very low.

I guess I don't really register the time factor for a lot of the home production. Gardening is family time, canning/preserving is family time, making bread is something that has very short "active work" sections, but is mostly double or triple-tasked with other activities, so it doesn't take a lot of time.

I'm quite the home-body, and I like having a variety of things to do, so I don't get bored. I design a few patterns each year, I write for a few magazines, we publish an increasing variety of books, I have church stuff... it all works into a pretty relaxed cycle of interesting stuff to do, actually.

It's not odd in my community for groups of families to get together, set up awnings in someone's driveway, and spend a day canning, playing games in the backyard, with potluck meals... it's an awesome way to spend a Saturday! Mixing productive work and social time is one of my favorite things, and it's even better when food is in the mix.

It's a different sort of lifestyle than was popular in the 80s, but jump back to the 70s and before, and there are thousands of communities all across the US with similar patterns. We're just neo-traditional.

*******

Striving, we're doing the same thing... pacing ourselves on last-years preservation, so we have room and tastebuds for fresh stuff in a few months. My kids are berry hounds, too. It is a good problem to have! I wonder if she'd enjoy doing a strawberry barrel this summer? They don't take up much patio space, and don't require digging or weeding.

Oh ElizabethClark, you brought up lots of wonderful memories. In the summer, my DFather would smoke batch after batch of salmon. DMom would process it in the canner and we would have smoked salmon for the holidays and beyond. We became quite spoiled and would complain about having to eat creamed salmon on toast, or smoked salmon dip, smoked salmon on crackers, etc.

When we were in the lower 48, we would get cherries and peaches by the cases and we would process them. We then would transport them back up to AK.

When in AK we would pick blueberries, salmon berries (a solid colored berry that comes in numerous colors about the size and texture of a raspberry), huckleberries and make enough jam to last the year. We would also freeze to make pies or muffins throughout the year.

Thanks for the memories, tee hee!

I think I could have made a really good 1950s mom, or even earlier, but wasn't maybe born into the right environment. Not only have we mostly lived (when not in foreign countries with my diplomat father) in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, we've always had a very structured lifestyle. Because my parents divorced when I was very small, we never had a mother at home; she was at the office. So I never learned things like canning from her, because she never had time (and maybe not the knowledge) to do things like that. And there was no place to grow vegetables, etc.

I think the area near our nation's capital, and maybe many larger cities, has a different "climate" (beyond the actual physical climate. It's very work-oriented-I think excessively so- and particularly in the current economy, one daren't even hint that one's job or potential job isn't the highest priority in one's life. Add to that being widowed with a son to raise and a mother to help take care of (both while working full-time), and a lot of things I might have done, such as canning, fall by the wayside. I'm really glad some of you can do such things - although I draw the line at homemade noodles. They are so inexpensive at the store - why would you want to sacrifice irretrievable time to make them? But what doesn't work for may may be just right for you.

The past few years when I've had an herb garden, along with the occsional arugula plant, etc. - I get a small thrill out of eating my "own" food. If someday I can retire and other conditions, such as having space, permit, maybe I will have a garden and fix some of my own food from start to finish.

It does me good to know that these skills aren't becoming lost arts.

Homemade noodles: awesome flavor and texture. But I have a rolling pin large enough to scare them flat, little effort required. It makes a difference.

I think you're spot-on, Simplicity... different cities have very different personalities. In Portland, OR, it's totally normal for people to bike to work, grow balcony and sidewalk gardens, and even have casual jobs that only make ends meet if you have communal living spaces... that sort of thing would be *highly* atypical in DC, I'd think!

Herb gardening is one of the THE most cost-effective things you can do. Home-grown herbs take very little space, but to buy them fresh, you'd pay a whole lot. When we've not had ground space or even balcony space to grow much, we have done our own favorite herbs, and I loved the savings and freshness. I'm glad others enjoy it, too!

My mother's mother was the hostess at my grandfather's restaurant, so she worked full time (and didn't do domestic stuff beyond ironing and cleaning... she just didn't enjoy it at all); my mom learned to cook, garden, sew, can, etc from my dad's mother while in high school, and as a young married woman. Dad's mom was at home full-time until she went out to work full-time when my dad graduated school. My aunt learned from my mom (she's 12 years younger than mom, and lived with us when I was small), and also on her own. We have a family joke that Auntie M could grow a house addition by laying out the foundation, watering and weeding, and just waiting for fall.

There have been so very many of my generation who are going for a more traditional lifestyle, with modern twists, that the explosion of books, blogs, and such has been tremendous! It's exciting to me that the skills aren't being lost... I'm right there with you, Simplicity!

Striving: The garbanzo stew recipe is out of a southwest slow cooker book. Yes, it has zip to it! The girls aren't so keen on it!

Still need to make it and the tomatillo stuff. I was so tickled to see that my local grocery was selling not only almond milk but also coconut milk! After buying the 1/2 gallon of it though I had second thoughts. I made coconut tomato soup and then chili with some of those leftovers and then used the milk up in quinoa pudding. The soup needs some work ~ too bland, but the pudding was delicious!