I've been thinking about food a lot lately.
Hubby and I have been canning. My dad gave us a 20lb box of tomatoes from Keremeos, in the southern Okanagan Valley. (Dad works in Penticton and lives in Mission, so he drives the Crowsnest Hwy twice a week, usually.) We roasted three panfulls, removed as much skin as we could, and then canned them in a hot water bath - 35 minutes!! Much too long... a pressure canner takes 10. So we're thinking of buying a pressure canner as an early Christmas present to one another. They're about 100 bucks :)
Investing in a canner would allow us to can pretty much ANYTHING, including salmon (yum!), without fear of nasty organisms. I could even can jars of broth instead of freezing them in plastic containers - like the massive amounts of broth I made out of my aunt's Thanksgiving turkey carcass. We might also be able to manage a bulk meat order, like, say from a local beef producer (1/2 a cow, anyone?).
Once upon a time, I lived in the Mainland Inlets (specifically Knight Inlet), near the north end of Vancouver Island (around Alert Bay and Pt McNeill), on a float house. My partner hunted deer meat, and we canned it. That was the easiest stew starter I've ever had. Nowadays, when I want stew, it usually means defrosting something first - almost a 2 day process for this busy lady. One pressure canner batch of gristly meat could make a winter's worth of 'stew starter'. The possibilities are endless :)
However, this doesn't get at the heart of my food concerns - I mostly wonder about the grain products we consume, such as cereal, crackers, corn chips, bread tortillas, muffins... I've even recently become concerned about the SUGAR in juices labeled 'unsweetened' - I read on a Yahoo homeschooling list that Health Canada thinks of the sugar in juice as a PROCESS, not an INGREDIENT. WTH?!
Add to this the fact that most sugar is now produced from genetically modified sugar beets... how on Earth is a person with a limited budget supposed to stay on top of this?
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