gear up for food-preservation season, with erica strauss (giveaway!)

ARE YOU READY TO PUT UP your coming harvests—to can dry beans and crushed tomatoes, make pestos for the freezer, get pickling and more? Now’s the time–not when 18 pounds of green beans and 84 dangerously ripe tomatoes are sitting on your kitchen counter–to form a food-preservation plan for what you’re growing this year, to put it up for the long haul.

Erica Strauss of NWEdible dot com and I discussed how—plus we’re each offering giveaways of key canning gear to help in the effort. (And no, that’s not us in the 1940s photo above from the Library of Congress–but we both think food preservation is more fun when tackled with friends.)

Even if you’re a CSA shareholder or a farm-market shopper, and not a vegetable gardener, now’s likewise the moment to make plans for when the bounty you’ll purchase comes in. Do you have fresh lids for canning jars? Enough pickling salt or citric acid? Have you eaten your way through last year’s canned, dried and frozen goodies to even make room for incoming batches?

On my public-radio show and podcast (listen on the player below, or at this link; it’s the June 15, 2015 show), I asked Erica’s advice about food preservation from another perspective than my one-person-household, vegetarian, Northeastern perspective. She’s part of a household of four omnivores in Seattle, plus ducks and chickens and lots more who live in her homestead-style suburban landscape. Erica’s also a former professional cook, with a new book coming out this fall called “The Hands-On Home: A Seasonal Guide to Cooking, Preserving, and Natural Homekeeping.”

Read along as you listen to the June 15, 2015 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or

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