Safe Food

I will be posting a little later today about what I have been up to lately, but while finishing my tea this morning I came upon an interesting blog post from George Africa who owns a perennial plant nursery in Vermont. It seems today is Blog Action Day a day when bloggers around the world add their thoughts about a single topic. This year’s topic is Food which is near and dear to my heart. I am very excited about learning how best to eat locally and a big part of that here, with our short growing season, is preserving local food to eat throughout the winter. There is lots of that going on around me. Mom has been dehydrating like crazy and managed to burn out two second hand dehydrators! She decided to spring for a brand new one and left our house yesterday with a huge kale plant to dry for me. Ev always inspires me with her preserving efforts. She has been jamming, canning, juicing and dehydrating anything she can get her hands on. I have a long way to go in that regard as I am easily distracted by gardening, fall decorating and just about anything else at this time of year. Truthfully I am not all that fond of canning things. What I am fond of however, is tasty home canned food, so I work hard at pushing myself to do it anyway. I still have apples waiting to be processed, berries to be jammed, carrots and leeks to be dug, chopped and frozen,beets to pickle and venison to be made into sausage. And I’ll be getting to it. . . as soon as I put the garden to bed, decorate the front garden for fall and Halloween ( I’m thinking giant spider with webs on the gazebo) and I make a few more concrete leaf sculptures. Hmmmm. . . . I think I had better wake up Jesse and put him to work or I’ll never get it all done! (Some days it’s handy to have a strong boy who knows how to garden and cook.) I’ll leave you with the link to George’s post and ask what you have to say about this year’s topic. . . What thoughts do you have about food?