I’ve shared with you how I buy several vegetables, like potatoes, yams, and carrots in bulk once a month.  And for many months, I’ve been happy with my storage system.  Last month was the first time that I found some foods started to get soft spots before we could eat them, and required a lot of last minute effort to quickly use everything up before they spoiled from the heat.

I was anticipating the need to be careful about that this month, because of the heat.  But I didn’t think I’d have to worry about it so soon!  It’s been only two weeks since I bought the yams and sweet potatoes, and ten days since buying carrots.  Well, the carrots were a disaster – I think all you need is one carrot in the middle to start to rot and it gets the snowball rolling.

I probably still had 30 of the original 50 pounds left, and had to throw away several, and peel every single one that was left.  The yams weren’t quite as bad, but I saw that I was going to need to take action faster than I expected to prevent losing a lot more.

So today ended up a canning day, after pear picking.  I’m so glad that I’ve learned how to can this summer, and have the equipment to do it.  It saved the day – otherwise I would end up throwing a way a lot of produce in the next few days because it’s much more than I can use for our family’s immediate needs.

I canned two quarts of yams (I could have canned a lot more but didn’t know how much I needed to fill all the jars, and didn’t prepare enough), then didn’t have enough left to fill a quart so I stuck in some carrots to fill it up.  My canner can accomodate 7 quarts at a time, and it doesn’t take more or less time to run a large or small load, so I wanted to fill up another 4 quarts with something.  I had all of those freshly peeled carrots around, so that’s what I decided to use.

After filling one quart, though, I thought I should do something more interesting than plain carrots.  So the next quart had carrots and onions, then the next two were carrots, onions, and some chicken thrown in (I had a package that was accidentally defrosted and since I’m not planning to use it this week, this was the perfect use for it). It will make a good base for a stew or soup one busy day.

Then I pulled some meaty lamb bones out of the freezer to make a stock with.  This ended up being a good thing to do, since a short while later my husband came home with a bunch of turkey bones, and there was room in the freezer for them!  Since the potatoes are starting to sprout from the heat, I decided to can potatoes and carrots in the lamb broth, adding the pieces of lamb that came off the bones to each jar – I did 7 quarts of that.

Tomorrow’s activity will be canning all of the turkey meat from the turkey bones, and then canning it with more potatoes and the remaining carrots in the turkey stock.  It’s not exciting but it will be tasty and filling when we want to use it, and shelf stable until then.

My 7 year old daughter was hoping to help me tonight with the lamb stock, but it was too late and she had to go to bed, so she was happy to know that she could do it tomorrow.  And my 15 year old asked if he could can a batch, too.  I can only do two batches of meat or vegetables a day (fruits/pickles/jams go much faster because they require significantly less processing time), so they will be the helpers for tomorrow.  (Helpers is really understating what they do – I’ll mostly supervise and they’ll do the bulk of the work.)

For my next shopping trip, I’m not going to buy vegetables in such large amounts unless I have a plan to can or dehydrate them right away.  Especially for the carrots, I ended up not paying any less than I would have paid for a smaller amount, once I factor in those that had to be thrown away.  One thing that I look forward to about the winter is the ease of keeping vegetables fresh outside of the fridge – but there are so many wonderful things about the summer that I’m not wishing for it to be over!

Avivah