Posted by Janet Harriett on Aug.01, 2010

ⓒ iStockPhoto - JKendall

You may have heard of Once a Month Cooking.  Once A Year Shopping works basically the same way. Buy produce now, when it’s cheap, abundant, and high-quality, and with a bit of time spent with home food preservation, you can have a winter’s worth of meal-ready fruits and veggies ready for dinners you can throw together in just a few minutes when the time comes.

Once a Year Shopping for produce doesn’t require as much advanced menu planning as OAMC. A few flexible dishes like soups, stews and vegetable bakes can use many types of produce, so you only need to pay attention to buying foods that your family will enjoy, and preserve them so you can use them in multiple dishes.

Canning Made Easy

Unless you have a proper pressure canning setup, stick to canning fruits and pickles. Canning isn’t that hard, but people die each year from botulism poisoning from improperly home-canned vegetables; the fact that no one in the family became violently ill from Granny’s open-kettle canned corn has at least as much to do with luck as safety. Fruits are high-acid, and can be safely canned with no added sugars. I also make a few batches of salsa, which I can dump in a saucepan with some protein (beans or protein crumbles), chili powder, cumin and dehydrated peppers for a quick and easy chili night.

Dehydrating: Not Just for Camping

Dried vegetables work best in soups or other dishes where they have plenty of liquid to absorb, and a little extra liquid won’t kill the recipe. This time of year, my dehydrator is going nonstop. Shredded zucchini and chopped sweet peppers get dried for winter soups, along with thin-sliced carrot coins and sweet corn cut from the cob. The elderberries go through the dehydrator, to be added to teas this winter when the colds start spreading. Halved cherry tomatoes, with the seeds scooped out, stand in for sun-dried tomatoes in many recipes, including soups, dips, salads and breads. Sliced fruits can be rehydrated for baked desserts, like apple crisp, and are also great in hot cereal, granola or just plain as a snack.

Last year, I tried dehydrating cabbage for my winter staple, cabbage soup. Learn from my mistake. Cabbage will dehydrate - given long enough, anything will dry - but the texture when rehydrated was, to put it mildly, weird. Now, I freeze my chopped cabbage. Eggplant is another veggie with so-so results from dehydrating.

Freezing Produce for the Frozen Months

The only limit to what goes in the freezer is what can fit. My kitchen freezer, as well as the 10 cubic foot chest freezer in the garage, are full to overflowing with vegetable broths, fruits and vegetables. All winter long, all I need to do is pull out a container of broth and a few baggies of vegetables, and throw the whole lot in the slow cooker or a saucepan to defrost and simmer for supper. I also make gallon bags of mixed vegetables (eggplant, zucchini, onion, tomatoes, peppers, green beans and whatever else I find) for slow-roasted veggie ragout, and sock away the fixings for green smoothies.

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Posted under Cooking Healthy, Food, Nutrition & Recipes.