Part Eight
Oh, I’m getting tired, but I need to stay awake. Hopefully the kids will wind down and get some rest so I can without worrying what they’ll get up to if I’m asleep. I’m also waiting on someone, but I don’t know if they’ll show. I’m not there yet so let me explain a few more things.
The “cold room” at the homeplace is pretty awesome. It was something that Mom read about in a book when she was a girl and had always thought about. And she’d gathered all the plans and stuff and had put them aside, thinking that they were unobtainable … which they had been at the time. Then came the Homeplace and … she just wanted it. Wanted it to the point of being obsessed. She drove Dad and I a little crazy about it to be honest. But he always wanted her to have what she wanted, and he finally figured a way to get it for her.
First, he took part of the basement that is the old root cellar and basically a room that was carved out of the granite that holds up one of the outside corners of the homeplace. That room was kind of icky until we cleaned it up, including putting a drain in the floor that ran to a dry-barrel septic tank we dug and put in outside the house for any runoff and condensation from the room to run into and then disperse through a “septic field”. That was the “easy” part of the project.
Next, where Dad got them I have no idea, but it was probably something from the Plant. They were three “portable” coolers … like refrigerators only they open like a chest freezer. They can be run out in the field using a generator, a car battery hook-up, or solar power. The problem is they pull a lot of juice. What Dad did was two-fold. First, he divided the old root cellar into two rooms. On one side he lined the walls with commercial grade polyurethane insulation and over that he put shelves made out of flashing. The shelves were very uniform with a channel in them and that was for a reason. That was also the side that had the drain in it. He also insulated the other side the same way except instead of shelves he put the three portable coolers and ran the power for them through conduit up through the ground and to a specific set of solar panels. These panels he set up with a Fresnel lens. What that lens does is magnify the power that the solar panels collect. That is what powers those portable coolers and provides three “refrigerators that we used for only the most important of our necessities, like our refrigerated medicines including my insulin. We have back up power for them through a propane generator, but the object is not to need it by not depleting the batters that the solar panels are charging.
That other room was to become a walk-in freezer. Unfortunately, it has yet to make it year-round. More like the ice houses of old that lasted most of the year but that eventually had to be replenished once it got cold enough for water to freeze again. Those shelves made of flashing? We would freeze blocks of water and set them on the shelves. Dad found these cool insulated doors off a set of old walk-in coolers they were upgrading at the Plant and used them for the doors on those two rooms. Also, the cold air from the “freezer” side can be piped over to the “cooler” side so that the coolers don’t have to work so hard.
Now there are some rules. We don’t go in those rooms any more than necessary. When we do go in, we try and get in and out as quickly as possible so that the cooler and cold air doesn’t escape, and hot air doesn’t get in. There are plastic flaps on the inside of the doors that also help to keep the cold air in. Another point is that what we put in those two rooms needs to be cooled off first so that something hot doesn’t require the rooms and equipment to work harder than necessary. Because of the dampness those rooms also must be kept scrupulously clean so no mold or mildew develops.
Once the homeplace had been re-roofed and all the delayed maintenance taken care of, Dad and Mom had other ideas they wanted. The finished part of the basement was hidden from the rest of the house and could be converted into both living and sleeping areas by using murphy beds. It was kinda insane all the hidden spaces the homeplace is now made up of.
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And we filled those hidden spaces as much as we could. I’ve mentioned we had the freeze driers mom inherited from Grams running almost constantly. We freeze dried a lot of meat so that Dad and I could stick to our diets. I kept that up even after Mom went to Heaven and in the last year Dad insisted we use one of the freeze driers for meat exclusively, sometimes both of them at the same time. We freeze dried domesticated meat like beef, chicken, goat, turkey, and Cornish hens. Lean pork like ham, Canadian bacon, and tenderloins. We freeze dried wild meat as well like venison, rabbit, pheasant, duck, and goose. If I didn’t have meat going, I had vegetables high in fiber and low in carbs like bell peppers, broccoli, mushrooms, zucchini, cucumbers, green beans, asparagus, celery, tomatoes, squash, cauliflower, radishes, brussel sprouts, garlic, snap peas, cabbage, and onions. I also did the more traditional vegetables that were higher in sugars and starches but only for my siblings to eat so yeah, there was a ton of them as well.
I dehydrated fruits and vegetables for adding to things like soups, stews, meatloaf and homemade breads that I would bake for the others to eat. Sometimes I would also dry and powder them. Against my better judgement I also freeze-dried candies and treats and put them in mylar bags and hid them away so no one would ask for them and they could be treats they received at the holidays and things like that. I freeze dried watermelon
[1] and tropical fruits as a kind of “healthy” candy. I canned citrus fruit
[2][3], candied the peel as yet another kind of treat, and freeze dried the fruit and peel to use that way. I even did things like freeze dried ice cream
[4] and sherbet if I could get it on sale, or make our own using the small batch ice cream maker I’d picked up at an estate sale.
I canned everything that I freeze dried and dehydrated plus things like ground beef, ground sausage, hot dogs, kielbasa, smoked sausage, convenience items like soups, stews, chili, salsas, and sloppy joe mix. I canned meatballs every way I could manage … with spaghetti sauce, sweet and sour sauce, plum sauce, BBQ sauce, in a broth base to make stroganoff, and all the other etc you can think of. When I could get flavored sausage in flavors like chicken-apple, caramelized onion and cheddar, mango jalapeno I also canned them; sometimes whole and sometimes in “bites”.
I canned bacon
[5] because my brothers all think it is a food group all its own. But doggone that stuff is expensive, or at least the good stuff is, so I learned to make our bacon
[6] from the pork belly Dad would cut from the feral hogs we hunted. I also made a lot of jerky
[7] because even Dad and I could eat that as a snack or treat a couple times a week. I canned fish
[8] and seafood like crab
[9] and shrimp
[10] and clams
[11] because buying those little cans at the grocery store just wasn’t happening and because the Plant owners would sometimes give Dad frozen boxes of seafood for some under the table work.
Based on Mom’s notes and my own research I figured out how to store pastas for long term storage
[12]. I also continued her practice of storing whole grains
[13], dried beans
[14], and nuts
[15]. I made the family bread from whole grains and sometimes freeze dried
[16] that as well as flour-less crackers like zucchini cheese crackers
[17]. The most common bread I made was Ezekiel Bread
[18] so I stored all the ingredients for it in bulk. I freeze dried rice and some rice dishes but not in any quantity because rice already lasted a long time so long as it was stored property. I freeze dried stir fry mixes which is what I planned on Dad and I eating a lot of. I freeze dried eggs
[19] and cheese
[20]. If I couldn’t get to the eggs fast enough and they became a surplus (not often), I would can pickled eggs
[21] in all the flavors I had recipes for. We made our own condiments
[22] on top all the rest because I could control the amount of sugar in them.
I couldn’t freeze dry butter because of the oil content but I could can
[23] it. Same for milk because of the fat content; I couldn’t freeze dry it but I could can it
[24]. I freeze dried yogurt
[25]. I even tried freeze dried cream cheese
[26] and sour cream
[27] and which I was thankful for when the experiment worked. I preserved much more food than we would eat any given day. Dad insisted. The freeze driers ran every day we were in town. The dehydrators ran every day because I had them both in town and at the homeplace. I ran at least two canning batches every day, usually more, and it didn’t matter whether we were in town or the homeplace because I had equipment in both places. In town the food primarily came from the food boxes Dad brought home from the Plant or from my grocery store runs where the first place I stopped was the clearance bins. So long as a piece of meat wasn’t out of date I would buy it and either freeze it for later use, or use it to make a big batch of something for dinner that would have enough left over for a full load of jars in the pressure canner. Certain times of year I would also hit up the state’s farmers market at the fairgrounds and it was rare for the Dollar Bags of stuff that were passed their prime to escape me. At the homeplace the food mostly came from hunting, gardening, and the bartering we did.
It sounds like all I did was cook and preserve food between homeschooling the sibs and taking my own college classes. If that had been all, I could have done it standing on my head but that wasn’t all I did.
[1] How To Freeze Dry Watermelon | Freeze Dried Guide
[2] Canning Oranges
[3] Canning Lemons ~ Three Ways
[4] How to Freeze Dry Ice Cream
[5] Canning Bacon: How To Can Bacon At Home
[6] Homemade Smoked Bacon - Hey Grill, Hey
[7] Beef Jerky Recipes (75+ Homemade Jerky Recipes) (75 recipes)
[8] Canning Fish: Salmon, Blue, Mackerel, Trout...
[9] Canning Crab Meat Recipe: How To Can Crab Meat At Home
[10] Canning Shrimp
[11] Canning Clams at Home: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners
[12] How to Store Pasta for the Long Term - Off The Beaten Grid
[13] Storing Grains and Storing Flour Long Term
[14] How to Store Dry Beans For The Long Term
[15] How to Store Nuts Long Term
[16] Can you freeze dry bread? - Chef's Resource
[17] View: https://youtu.be/4QSbOSgMcO0
[18] How to Make Ezekiel Bread - Food Storage Made Easy
[19] View: https://youtu.be/0JOE7hGyvZM
[20] How To Freeze Dry Cheese - Freeze Drying Mama
[21] Pickled Eggs - Recipes - Cooks.com
[22] 35 Condiments You Can Make at Home (35 recipes)
[23] The Ultimate Guide To Canning Butter At Home
[24] How to Can Milk
[25] Delicious Freeze-Dried Yogurt Drops - Harvest Right™ | Home Freeze Dryers | Freeze Dried Food Storage
[26] View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGpWK10BBMI
[27] How to Freezer Dry Sour Cream | Freeze Dried Guide
) to re-read it. Poor me. Thank you.
