It's that time of year when we realize the freezer is still packed with food and more food will be coming from the gardens and orchard soon. We are thankful that we've come through the winter with plenty but we also realize that we'd better use some things up. Frozen strawberries are good but attempting to eat a bunch of them right before this year's crop ripens takes the joy out of eating frozen strawberries. While we don't mind keeping canned goods for more than a year, we do try to eat up the frozen fruits and vegetables within a year.
This year we're trying something new to make sure we clean out the freezer and use up some of the older canned fruit: we're scheduling what preserved fruit to eat each day. To accomplish this, we first took an inventory of all the remaining frozen fruit and of the canned and dehydrated fruit that we still have from 2023 or before. Then we took an extra calendar and assigned fruit to particular days, evenly dispersing each fruit over the period until we will have that fruit fresh again. The strawberries, for example, typically start producing in early May, so we assigned days at regular intervals between now and then for when we will eat frozen strawberries. The schedule also includes frozen blueberries, peaches, kaki and American persimmon pulp, pawpaw, and mulberries, along with canned peaches, apple sauce, Kieffer pear sauce, canned pear halves, and dried apples (that we use almost exclusively in baked goods) and dried Asian pears (for snacking). It comes out to a little over one package or jar of fruit a day, plus some dried fruits (figs, jujubes, dried kaki persimmons...) we intentionally left out of the schedule and kiwis, the only fresh fruit we have left this time of year. We often enjoy fruit with breakfast or with yogurt as a snack later in the day.
Though planning it out took some time, we're finding it is saving work overall and is eliminating the potential for things getting forgotten. Every night, Hattie simply looks at the calendar and brings in the assigned fruit for the next day. If it is frozen fruit, it goes in a bowl in the fridge to thaw. If it is a canned good, it is left on the counter. There is no more trying to quickly thaw some frozen fruit in front of a fan first thing in the morning to have it with breakfast. There is no trying to think of what fruit we haven't had in a while and pulling it out. There is no overabundance of one kind of fruit right before the season is about to start. The plan lets us simply enjoy last year's bounty, one fruit after another.
While we need to work on the logistics of the food calendar some more, like figuring out when to start assigning days (probably when the last of a crop is preserved), I'm thinking of doing the same method for the preserved vegetables and maybe even meat. I've never been a menu planner. Eating fresh from the farm during the growing season requires a flexibility that I've gotten used to - salads when lettuce is abundant, tomato sandwiches when the tomatoes are ripe and plentiful, goat cheese stuffed peppers when the goat's are in milk and the peppers are turning color. But during these winter months, when we're eating heavily from our winter stores, scheduling our consumption seems like the answer to enjoying the bounty of the previous season while getting us ready to enjoy the bounty to come.
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