The Pantry Tally

As of today, I have canned 24 quarts of tomatoes, 8 quarts of pasta sauce, 4 quarts of whole peaches, 3 pints of sour cherry preserves, 6 pints of spiced vanilla peach butter, 4 pints of green pepper jelly, 2 pints of apple jelly (from windfallen apples from my mom's trees!) and 8 pints of salsa. 

Our freezer is packed to maximum capacity with corn, cherries, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, green beans, snap peas, spinach, and figs.  And I still know that we haven't put by enough (especially in the fruit department) to last us until next season. 

I've dehydrated corn, cherries, kale, sweet peppers, hot peppers, and potatoes... but only quart or two of each.  Not much.

I still feel like I have a lot of catching up to do. 

I'd like to have put by at least twice the amount of pasta sauce and tomatoes that we have canned at the moment.  We use a lot of canned tomatoes in our stand-by cold weather dinner recipes, like chick pea curry and black bean chili.  Pasta is a meal we fall back on time and again when my creativity in the kitchen is drying up. 

Red raspberries are back at our favorite Pick Your Own farm... but finding the time to get there and pick (a tedious and time-consuming task) is difficult.  I'm determined to get there within the next two weeks, and to freeze as many as I possibly can, and turn some more into fruit leather.

I definitely need to freeze and dry more corn.  A couple of weeks ago I bought a bushel of corn and ended up letting it dry out and feeding it to the chickens... I simply didn't find the time to preserve it.  At least it was used, but still... I hate waste.  I bought another bushel today and I intend to blanch, cut and freeze all of it by the end of the day tomorrow.

One thing we absolutely must address is the figs.  The tree is so overloaded with fruit, the chickens have learned not to run to the feed buckets in the morning, but to beneath the fig tree where overripe fruit litters the grass.  I want to can figs in syrup, dehydrate some, and make wine and jam.  We've put several full gallon bags of the fruit in the freezer to be used in wine or jam when we have the time, but we're now officially out of space in there.

Fall approaches, and with it will come applesauce, more apple jelly, apple butter, dried apples dusted with cinnamon... and of course, the delicious crunch of fresh apples off the tree.  Local galas have arrived at the farmer's market, my very favorite of apples.  I'd also like to make a large batch of hard cider... we have but one bottle of my two-year-old cider left and I can't bring myself to drink it and accept that it is simply all gone!  It tasted like rubber bands for the first six months and we put it away and forgot about it... when we rediscovered and opened a bottle, it was hard to stop drinking them. 

It is satisfying to look at all of those lovely jars of food lined up in the stairwell... but intimidating to think of the long months of winter not too far in our future.  Can now, sleep later!!