Angela Williams Duea - The Complete Guide to Food Preservation: Step-By-Step Instructions on How to Freeze, Dry, Can, and Preserve Food

A few years back we lost our beloved pet dog Bear, who was not only our best and dearest friend but also the Vice President of Sunshine here at Atlantic Publishing. He did not receive a salary but worked tirelessly 24 hours a day to please his parents.

Bear was a rescue dog who turned around and showered myself, my wife, Sherri, his grandparents Jean, Bob, and Nancy, and every person and animal he met (well, maybe not rabbits) with friendship and love. He made a lot of people smile every day.

We wanted you to know a portion of the profits of this book will be donated in Bears memory to local animal shelters, parks, conservation organizations, and other individuals and nonprofit organizations in need of assistance.

Douglas and Sherri Brown

PS: We have since adopted two more rescue dogs: first Scout, and the following year, Ginger. They were both mixed golden retrievers who needed a home.

Want to help animals and the world? Here are a dozen easy suggestions you and your family can implement today:

• Adopt and rescue a pet from a local shelter.
• Support local and no-kill animal shelters.
• Plant a tree to honor someone you love.
• Be a developer put up some birdhouses.
• Buy live, potted Christmas trees and replant them.
• Make sure you spend time with your animals each day.
• Save natural resources by recycling and buying recycled products.
• Drink tap water, or filter your own water at home.
• Whenever possible, limit your use of or do not use pesticides.
• If you eat seafood, make sustainable choices.
• Support your local farmers market.
• Get outside. Visit a park, volunteer, walk your dog, or ride your bike.

Five years ago, Atlantic Publishing signed the Green Press Initiative. These guidelines promote environmentally friendly practices, such as using recycled stock and vegetable-based inks, avoiding waste, choosing energy-efficient resources, and promoting a no-pulping policy. We now use 100-percent recycled stock on all our books. The results: in one year, switching to post-consumer recycled stock saved 24 mature trees, 5,000 gallons of water, the equivalent of the total energy used for one home in a year, and the equivalent of the greenhouse gases from one car driven for a year.

Introduction

B efore the canning and butchering industries became widespread, families had to preserve their own food by canning, drying, and salting produce and meat. Each year, a familys major efforts were focused on storing up enough food for the wintertime. Today, most people can run out to the grocery store to pick up a pound of bacon or a jar of applesauce, but some still enjoy the practice of preserving their own foods. Many people are more careful about the additives and quality of the food they eat, or prefer to select organic foods. Other people like to have several options for storing the produce from their own gardens when the freezer is full, it is nice to be able to put away jarred fruits and vegetables in the pantry.

Storing food is a great option to increase the amount of available food for less money. By buying produce in season, you can get the best price. Then you can enjoy those foods in an off-season when the grocery store sells the same produce, picked and shipped from far away, for double or triple the cost of the in-season price. Canning can be a safe and economical way to preserve quality food at home. Disregarding the value of your labor, canning homegrown food may save you half the cost of buying commercially canned food. Preserving your own foods is economical. Once you make your investment in canning equipment, the only supplies you will need to buy in future years are the two-piece screw-top lids, a few freezer bags, plastic containers, or other equipment that can also be washed and re-used. Drying foods requires even less equipment to produce a large supply of healthful meals.

People are concerned about buying locally grown, in-season foods. Besides offering fresher produce, this reduces the amount of pollution and energy needed to get food from the farm to the consumer. Preserved foods are often more healthful than weeks-old fresh produce at the market. Think about buying tomatoes off-season these fruits are harvested before they are ripe so that they will remain edible during handling and shipping. The unripe fruit is then often treated with a ripening agent and perhaps a preservative. The truck, train, plane, and/or ship that brings you the food spreads pollution across the country as the produce makes its way to your market. Then the fruit sits in a refrigerated bin until you buy it at an inflated price, and when you bring it home, you are eating a tasteless, over-processed tomato. Appetizing, right?