Last week I wrote about the Fill Your Pantry event in Redmond and how I burst with joy to see such bounty, especially the 25 pound bags of colorful produce.
That event reminded me of the time that my friend Rachel and I took a class from the OSU extension service on agriculture in the Willamette valley. We toured many commercial farms, orchards and processors. One of the farms we visited was the Montecucco family farm in Canby, Oregon. The farm has grown rhubarb, beans, beets, parsnips, rutabagas and turnips for four generations. They grow a red and yellow striped specialty beet which they sell to fancy restaurants in southern California. The massive cold storage facility was dark and clammy like a modern day cave. Thousands of 25 pound bags of beets and other root vegetables were stacked from floor to ceiling.
On our way out, we were each handed a 25 pound bag of beets that wholesaled for $6.50. Rachel and I were delighted to have something unusual – striped beets – but oh my, what to do with 50 pounds of beets? We put them in the garage and like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, said to ourselves “Tomorrow is another day”.
That weekend, I attended the Oregon Thoroughbred Breeders Association annual dinner in the clubhouse at the Portland Meadows racetrack. I won three bales of rice hulls which are the Cadillac of bedding in horse stalls. That night when I got home, I opened the garage door and plopped the bags next to the beets then went to bed.
I must have thought beets storage in my sleep because the next day it occurred to me that I might be able to store the beets in the rice hulls. Sure enough, root vegetables were often stored in sawdust. Rachel and I rounded up some wooden crates and layered the beets with the hulls. They lasted several months.
We thoroughly enjoyed having a generous supply of beets on hand. We roasted, steamed, pickled and fermented them, made soups and salads and shared some. At the grocery store they were three or four dollars a bunch which made us feel smug. After that, a 25 or 50 pound bag of something or other did not intimidate us at all.
That was the beginning of my work with the “Plenty Method”, a way to find, buy, share, store and use food bought in bulk at wholesale or farm-direct prices. It’s fun to Fill Your Pantry then share or exchange the extra with friends, family and neighbors; doing that definitely increases your well-being in life.
And since your food dollars go so much further, you can eat like you are a king or a queen.
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