Putting food by

Image by Earthworm via Flickr

That’s how my grandmother referred to canning, freezing, drying, pickling, and storing root crops in the fruit (root) cellar.  Putting food by.  I like that.  It brings to mind that you’re putting food aside to get you through the long, cold, dreary winter.  That was much more important 50 years ago when the food you could purchase was more limited and whether or not you could feed your family during the winter depended on how much food you put by during the harvest season.

These days, I think a lot of people would have serious problems if the food distribution system would happen to be disrupted for a couple of weeks.  Not so with my grandma.  She  could make it through the entire winter without going to the grocery store,  if necessary.  In addition to her garden and fruit trees, she had chickens.  I didn’t really like messing with them when I was a kid, some of them were kind of mean and enjoyed chasing little girls.  And I couldn’t stand to watch her kill them.  But she always had eggs and meat on hand.

I don’t put food by to the extent that Grandma did, but I did a little pickling the other day with my abundance of cucumbers and peppers.

Cubanelle peppers…

Some of those peppers sliced and pickled.  Okay, I kind of cheated on these.  I had just emptied the last of the sweet peppers from this jar and simply put the sliced pepper rings back in the jar using the same liquid…I had some of these on a veggie sandwich yesterday and they tasted just as good as the original.

Refrigerator pickles…these will be ready to eat in just a few more days.

This jar is really more of a veggie salad.  I just used the veggies I had left over, put them in the clean jar and poured my favorite Hendrickson’s sweet vinegar and olive oil dressing over them…these are seriously good!

Alright, Grandma would probably shake her head at my meager attempts at putting food by, but I’m pretty pleased with the results.

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