More of the Larder Story

Opie, Chibs and Fiona

It’s no secret that a big part of our “pantry” utilizes freezers.  Of course cute photos of sweet porkers, chicks and calfies make for better blog viewing.  Freezer pictures are a little boring, actually.

Finch and Reese

 

cornish cross meat chicks

But this is the reality on the farm, the meat and other food items end up here.  Growing up we had a small freezer, and kept the bulk of our meat, and frozen produce at the locker.  Six miles away. Inconvenient as heck, except that my mom did the books for the store that served as the country store, butcher and locker, so you would assume that she would grab something from the locker while she was there on Saturdays doing the accounting.  What happened though is that no one ever wanted to go to the cold locker and get all the unidentifiable stuff stored there.  My mom worked full-time in town, so to stop at the locker on the way home in your town clothes was not a favorite thing either.  Subsequently, I think know a lot of what went in that locker got thrown away each year when butchering and harvesting time came.  As we all know, its hard to stop that preserving train once its left the station.  I swear my brother and I got more laughs out of trying to figure out what those unrecognizable globs of stuff were, since we were tasked to go to the locker and “make room”.  At least the meat was properly wrapped and marked so it was clear what year it was from.  Needless to say our dogs ate well… .  (I think my mom invented meatless Monday, we just didn’t think it was cool, because really, when you raise beef cows… . Just sayin’)  The locker wasn’t free either, I can’t remember what the monthly rental was, but we had three, and they were terribly hard to deal with, it was colder than you know what in there, and it was like an archaeological dig in an ice field to find what you might be looking for.

As for having all our eggs in one basket, I worry way less about our freezers in the event of some disaster.  Mostly because that little country store changed hands several times, and I still kept that locker rental going.  Then the new owners decided to remodel and offered to keep our meat in their extra freezer there during the construction.  One day we got a phone call, it seemed that all was copacetic until someone asked the store owner if they had a dead body in the basement.  The dead body was our meat and theirs, someone had inadvertently unplugged the freezer during the remodel, and no one noticed.  We decided to invest in a couple of freezers right then.  So no, I don’t worry much.  Stuff happens, my desire to eat canned meat is pretty low, compared to having it frozen and ready to be prepared as we choose.

Which brings me to some of the details of how and why we freeze some things and not others.  To simplify the description of my preserving style, I would have to say my goal is to stock ingredients, whole foods, not prepared foods, including soups.  I don’t keep freezer inventory, nor do I menu plan.  It’s all in my head, and if something happens to me someday, it will be someone else doing the food keeping, they can keep records if they choose.  Because we raise our own, we know there is an end to the supply, if we run out of something, we run out, we don’t just buy more to fill in the gap.  Keeping a plan and inventory are just more chores that don’t change the fact of what is in the freezer.  It frees my mind up in all actuality because I don’t need to “stick to the plan.” To make it easier on others around me, I keep the food somewhat sorted and labeled if the item is not obvious.  Frozen broccoli needs no explanation, just the year, something like romesco sauce or pesto does need a label in addition to the year.  Today I’ll concentrate on our freezer contents and follow-up on the next post with other items we can, store, or dehydrate.

What we freeze:

Beef, pork, chicken, soup bones, colostrum, butter, cheese, tallow, lard, bone broth, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, nectarines, melon, broccoli, cauliflower, romanesco, corn, mushrooms, snap peas, shell peas, corn, peppers, pesto, and romesco.

Without further ado here are boring pics of several of the freezers, taken with my phone so I didn’t get all the shelves in the photos.  We have five freezers, I took photos of three.  Of the other two, one is full of whole chickens, the other flotsam and jetsam for pet food, not much to see in those.  Keep in mind these are freezers for a three person family that eats three meals every day from the farm.  We probably eat out five times a year total.

This freezer is our most used one and is in our basement.  Berries, butter, bacon are in here.  We don’t eat bacon every day but I want to know where my bacon is all the time, since we stick to our rule of only eating bacon from the pig we harvest.  I could eat bacon every day, but we like to think we’re being responsible nose to tail eaters by sticking to our guns on that.  Do I get wistful when I see bacon on everything and in every flippin’ recipe?  Yes, but that’s living pretty high on the hog even though bacon is on the bottom of the pig.  I didn’t take a photo of the door, it contains bone broth, spices, flour, and colostrum frozen in various containers.  I try to keep a spot open on one of the shelves to store things I might bring in from the other freezers that are in the shop.  When I go shopping, it is to the shop.

I’d like to think I am organized, and have all my freezers empty before any harvesting starts, but ha ha, that never happens, except in the chicken freezer.  This freezer has beef roasts and steaks on the top shelf (not shown), ground beef on the next two shelves,  pork on the bottom shelf, and misc mostly bones for stock and some overflow frozen broccoli.  I try to stick with my rule of meat below veggies and fruit, but to tell you the truth the only blood that gives me the willies is chicken blood, I would not care for that on my veggies or fruit, but beef and pork blood not so much.  Still it’s a good idea to store meat below your vegetables and fruit.

This is the door to the same freezer, unrendered lard and tallow (Bee I feel ya, this is just a small portion of fat I need to render), soup bones and some ’14 cauliflower.  I do freeze a goodly amount of broccoli and cauliflower, with the hopes we probably won’t need it as long as we keep our successions going.  It’s easy to grow, blanch and freeze, so when the next crop comes in this usually goes to the hens.  The dates really help with that, something I learned from those scarring locker experiences when I was a kid.  I make stock each week, and find it easier to just store the bones and make stock as needed.  But this is also a place where you could free up some freezer space by making your stock in one or two big batches, reducing and freezing or canning.  We store chickens whole too, and break them down as we eat them.  This again is a place to free up freezer space, by breaking down your chickens instead of storing the whole carcass.  The way you approach your meals and meal prep really determines the manner in which you freeze your food.

This freezer has the oldest beef that we need to use first, mostly steaks, roasts, and organ meats and a few straggler ground beef packages. In the canning jar boxes are wide mouth half pints full of pesto, romesco, shell peas, & chopped garlic scapes.  Bags of sliced nectarines, whole strawberries, and chopped peppers are in here also.  I don’t bother with pre-freezing anything on a tray anymore before committing the item to the freezer bag, everything still comes out of the bag just fine in the amount needed.  Part of that may stem too from skipping the washing step since we are harvesting our fruits here and bring them right in and put them in the freezer.  There is nothing to wash off.

This the door to the same freezer, corn off the cob, sauteéd chanterelles, and some wild blackberries.  Nothing too exciting, but very useful nonetheless.  By using freezer jars, I have these items in pre-measured amounts that come in handy for cooking. One thing I do that might not work for folks that purchase their meat, is that I thaw out ground beef and pork and make breakfast sausage and then refreeze the sausage.  I say it might not work because one time we were out of pork so I purchased some very expensive pork at the “best” natural food store meat counter and had the pork ground to order.  It got that off-smell within three days, and was a little slimy.  Which leads me to believe that even though this was organic pork it still was handled along with many other animals and contaminants in a large plant.  Which also goes to show you that it’s not just what the animal was fed it is how the meat is handled after the animal is dead.  I would eat a neighbors conventionally fed, small abattoir butchered meat before I would buy organic pork at the store.  Lesson learned.  Back to the as-needed sausage making thing, when I refreeze the sausage I freeze it in containers that hold about 5 days worth of breakfasts so we make sure we use it up in a timely manner just in case.  I do the same with our chickens.  I break down the carcass for three meals, a meal of oven fried wings, thighs and drumsticks, each breast is a meal, one for fajitas, one for stir-fry, and the backbone, wing tips and neck go into the stock pot and usually because I am sloppy on purpose with the knife I can pick one to two more cups of meat off the carcass when the stock is done, and that is reserved for chicken pot pie.  Out of that chicken, usually the breasts go back into the freezer to be refrozen and used later in the week.  Again, I don’t know if I should go out on a limb and recommend this method just because it works for me, but I’m throwing it out there in case you don’t want to spend a day breaking down 25 chickens.  Mileage may vary.

Stay tuned for the next episode, I am off to take photos of what we’re eating in the hunger gap in the way of fresh food.