If you’ve ever frozen food, you’ve preserved food. If you’d like to branch out into canning, dehydrating and fermenting, I’d love to be your guide.
Explore step-by-step tutorials, tips, and recipes to help you stock your pantry with homemade preserves, dried fruits and vegetables, tangy ferments, and freezer-friendly meals. These methods not only extend the life of your harvest but also bring the flavors of each season to your table all year long.
Preserving food is more than a skill—it’s a way to embrace simple living and stay connected to the food you grow or source locally.
I’ve written two books on preserving food, The Ultimate Guide to Preserving Vegetables and Pressure Canning for Beginners and Beyond.
Here are some free preserving food worksheets that will help you keep all your preserved food organized.
We kicked off July 4th weekend by going blueberry picking . Yes, we have blueberry bushes but they are not producing. Last year fire ants got into the pots and destroyed the roots. We bought new plants but they are still young. Normally, we would just go without but because of all the rain we …
Preserving tomatoes is a summer tradition in many homes. But preserving tomatoes can be more than spaghetti sauce and salsa. There are so many ways of preserving tomatoes and really, you need to do what is best for your family. Because I’m pretty simple, I mainly can tomatoes with onions and garlic and dehydrate tomatoes …
It seems to be feast or famine with cucumbers at our little homestead. Some years I just cannot get them to produce at all and other years I’m wondering what in the world we’re going to do with them all. We’re in a feasting year this year. Normally that would be a good thing but …
One of our goals this year was to add more herbs to our garden for both culinary and medicinal uses. Many times those uses overlap. The thing with herbs is that they do not grow year round outside (even in zone 9) and they are not always ready at the same time complimentary vegetables are …
Welcome to week one of Preserving the Harvest which will be a twelve week series on preserving fruits, vegetables and herbs to use throughout the year. My goals isn’t to teach you everything you need to know about every preservation method or every fruit or vegetable. My goal is to encourage you to not see …
I love playing around with different ferments. My family thinks it’s weird but that’s okay. I have a slaw recipe that I learned from a friend from Kenya and I wondered what it would taste like as lacto-fermented sauerkraut. It’s tastes great. My family isn’t big slaw or sauerkraut. When I make this slaw I …
Fermented peppers are one of the easiest fermented foods you can make – and one of the most useful to have on hand. I started fermenting peppers because of my husband. He refuses to eat vinegar pickles of any kind, which made sauerkraut a non-starter in our house for a long time. But fermented peppers? …
Fermentation is an old way of preserving food – really old, as in before refrigeration and before canning. Back in the day, you either dehydrated or fermented food to keep it from spoiling. Fermented foods include common items such as yogurt, cheese, and sauerkraut plus less common items such as kefir, kvass, and kimchi. Years …
My absolute favorite thing to grow is tomatoes. I love that there are literally thousands of varieties to try. I love the flavor of homegrown tomatoes – store bought tomatoes just cannot compare. I even love the smell of tomato plants – which don’t really smell very good, but I love them anyway. So, for canning …
My family loves salsa; we eat it on everything from eggs to tacos. My boys can polish off a quart of salsa and a couple of bags of tortilla chips in no time flat. Sometimes I like to serve a salsa that has a little extra nutrition, you know, to counter the bags of tortilla …
I love keeping home canned corn on hand. Although canning corn takes a little bit longer than canning other vegetables does, it’s totally worth it. There’s nothing like the flavor of locally grown sweet corn during summer, and when you can your own corn you can enjoy that bit of summer all year long. This …
Every spring one of the first herb seeds I sow are basil seeds. I liberally scatter them in several places in the garden. I do this for one reason…pesto! We love pesto so very much and I refuse to pay $5 for a small jar of basil pesto. So each summer you’ll find me making …
Canning beef stew is a great way to have meals-in-a-jar for lunches, quick dinners, and even emergencies. You can even use venison, lamb, pork, or other wild game in this home canned beef stew recipe. Every summer I find myself spending a few days canning beef stew, I make other canned soups and stews also …
I used to think it was silly to preserve lemons because they were available year round at the store whenever I happened to need one. Then I tried my first Meyer lemon and preserving lemons became a necessity. We have an amazing lemon tree that gives us several hundred pounds of lemons each year. So, …
We have a Meyer lemon tree in our yard that gives us more lemons than we can possibly use fresh. Most years that means hundreds of pounds of lemons coming off the tree over the course of a few months. I’ve learned to preserve them every way I can – freezing, fermenting, and dehydrating – …
Can you freeze lemons? Yes – and it’s one of the most useful things you can do when you have more lemons than you can use fresh. We have a Meyer lemon tree that produces hundreds of pounds of lemons most years, so I’ve been freezing them in every form imaginable for over a decade. …
I was an teenager before I saw canned potatoes. I was at a friend’s house and her mom was quickly making dinner and I saw her open a can of potatoes and dump them in a pot to heat up. Once they were heated up, she drained the water added salt, pepper, butter and a …
Every year we forage dewberries which are a wild blackberry that grows in our area. We try to pick enough to last the entire year. We freeze some of the berries and we make a super easy dewberry jam recipe to give as gifts and to enjoy ourselves. This same method can be used to …
I love the convenience of having canned black beans and other dried beans on hand. However, I don’t like the price of buying canned black beans. So one of the first things I learned to can in my pressure canner was how to can dried beans. Every year I buy dried beans in bulk at …
All along the rural roads in Texas there are wild mustang grapes and muscadine grapes that grow. Every summer we go grape hunting and pick enough grapes to make grape jelly and grape juice. Mustang grapes and muscadine grapes are not the same plant, although most of us use the terms interchangeably, but they and other …