Preparing for Winter V

Floss

I was in a huge Tesco earlier today and some shortages were obvious by the big spaces - fizzy pop being one gap I noticed. And my local Morrisons had no sausages 🤷‍♀️ but the local Asda, Aldi & Lidl all seem to be OK.

cuddlymarm

We’ve been this scenario many times over the last few years with Brexit and then COVID so as long as we manage to keep medicines and special foods in Eg if you’re diabetic or allergic as preppers we'll manage. Granted it would be nice to have all the supermarket shelves full, but we’ve never starved yet and if it’s a bit of an inconvenience to only have half a dozen types of cheese instead of 50 for example, compared to a lot of other countries we will be doing wonderfully.

Wraithlady

Primrose said:

  Makes you wonder how they coped in the Middle Ages when they had none of our modern food preservation techniques.  Preparing for winter must have been a far more difficult task  and I  imagine a lot of food was wasted or went rotten because they had fewer ways of preserving it.  Diets must have been very boring. 

I know Laura_Elsewhere has already answered this, but I had to put my 2p's worth in.

No way would a lot of food 'be wasted or [go] rotten' for the simple reason food you wasted or allowed to go rotten was food your family didn't have to eat in the winter - and starving to death is something to be avoided if at all possible . Waste was something only the super-rich could afford to do, food was comparatively expensive (to nowadays).

They smoked or dried meat, or preserved it in fat in covered pots , fruit and vegetables were dried or preserved in honey (yes, apparently, this was a thing) or salted (mainly vegetables) or kept in cool, dark 'lofts' in a nearby barn and checked and turned regularly - and you started preparing for winter roundabout the middle of summer once the crops started ripening. (Check out Nigel Slater's Middle Eastern programmes for a similar process in the Middle East).

I suppose, to modern tastes, the average peasant's diet would have been fairly boring, at the level of prosperous merchant, however, the menu would have been a lot more interesting and rather similar to Middle Eastern cuisine today.

Fiona236

Drinks sections are way low, cola and cartons of juice. 

Si_Clist

Oh what a surprise - we started picking our plumsons* this morning in the certain knowledge that they were bound to be riddled with plum moth larvae, only to find that very few indeed are.  This has thrown the stocking-up-for-winter into disarray on account of we're already scratching for storage space, and we've perhaps only picked a quarter of the bloomin' tree!  Here's what 28lb of plumsons looks like now.  Note jars and lids wombled from skips a couple of years back and still sealing perfectly ...

* The tree was supposed to be a damson but it turned out to be a plum, albeit a very nice one.

Mummy2cheekymonkeys

Can I ask what they are being preserved in liquid wise?

Primrose

Well done with the plums Si_clist . Surplus always a nice dilemma to have but it's alwys a dilemma when storage space of any kind is short.  Cooking the plums down to a ourree may save  a little space rather than trying to preserve them whole or In halves.  Puréed fruit like this goes very well with breakfast porridge where appearance perhaps isnt so important as when serving for desserts.

cornishchick

preparing for winter here,  

1. moving a sealed box of rock salt to the car boot. 
2. checked car box for winter. 
3. researching best way to use rock salt on my garden path ( had a nasty fall last winter, very early starts for work)
4. making my indoor space cosy and tidy,
5. all light bulbs now changed to LED, so not too concerned if I need lights on.
6. set up my dawn light up alarm ready for winter starts.
7.  stocked up on easy dried soup ingredients, can make a delicious leek and potatoes soup from dried leaks, powdered mash and stock cube. 
8. layer up summer clothes for winter, I work in a care home so always so warm when at work. layers work best.

I've disposed of my electric blanket this year as I didn't like the feel of it, I am going to try the quilt under the bottom sheet and layer bedding.

Si_Clist

Mummy2cheekymonkeys said:

Can I ask what they are being preserved in liquid wise?

Just weak sugar syrup.  Processed by the good old-fashioned water bath method as per our bible "Home Preservation of Fruit and Vegetables" 13th Edition, published HMSO 1971 (from which a lot of later books on preserving copied much of their content).

Plum purée is a neat idea, but in the depths of winter we find it a real treat to open the preserves cupboard, see all the jars of whole or halved fruit, and decide to scoff the contents of one between us instead of making a pud.

fionaandphil

@Si_Clist they look lovely and I know what you mean about having the whole fruits, in the middle of winter they are such a treat.  Do you have some outdoor space such as a garage or shed you could store them in?  I have an old cupboard in the garage and keep all our jams in there, it doesn't seem to do it any harm