How to Use this Book
This book is based on my desire to preserve vegetables in ways that my family will eat and do that as efficiently as possible. When possible, I preserve vegetables in a meal-ready way. Instead of canning a bunch of carrot slices in quart (1-L)-sized jars when I bring in a large carrot harvest, I’ll make a batch of Canned Spice Carrot Soup and a couple of jars of Fermented Mexican Carrots. Then, I’ll use the tops to make Frozen Carrot Top Pesto for the freezer. The carrot soup is the only time-consuming item; the other two can be put together while the soup is processing.
The first part of this book is an overview of food preservation methods: canning, both water bath and pressure canning, dehydrating, fermenting and freezing. You’ll find the basics of how to use these methods to safely preserve vegetables, but you won’t find details for every scenario that could happen while preserving vegetables. I’ve written these chapters with enough information to get you started preserving the harvest, but not so much information that it leads to confusion and information overload.
The rest of this book is focused on growing and preserving the most popular vegetables and herbs that are grown in the home garden. Each vegetable has its own chapter and, in that chapter, you’ll find instructions on how to grow, purchase, can, dehydrate, ferment and freeze that vegetable. You will also find recipes that highlight the vegetable; most of these recipes are for preserving the vegetable, but some recipes use the preserved vegetable.
Most of the recipes are written so that you’ll preserve small batches at a time, simply because I find that adjusting recipes to scale up is easier than scaling down. If your family likes a recipe, or if you have enough of one vegetable to make two batches of a recipe, just double the ingredients and it will work out fine. The exception to this is any of the jam or jelly recipes; don’t ever double a jam or jelly recipe or you run the risk of it not setting up.
I hope you read through the whole book to get a vision for how these different preservation methods can work together to stock your pantry with food your family will eat. Then, when a vegetable is in season, I hope you reread that vegetable’s chapter and make a plan for preserving all of the harvest in a variety of ways. Of course, I hope that some of our favorite preservation recipes become your family favorites, too.
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