Green Living
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Saving Food and Time
How much time to you spend saving food (prep, freezing, canning, etc)?
I am asking this after spending 1 hour picking, washing and cutting nearly 4 lbs of green beans. I haven't even taken the time to freeze them yet. I hope I can keep this up the rest of the summer. I know it is worth it though 
Re: Saving Food and Time
Well so far... none. I haven't really gotten into preserving yet, and with how cold this summer has been (seriously) not sure I'll have enough to harvest to save. Maybe some tomatoes.
I'm pretty low maintenance in the kitchen though anyway, so I have been really more interested in easy ways to preserve, like freezing.
I mostly share (friends & coworkers) and freeze.
Last night I cooked beans for dinner, then blanched a batch after dinner and froze them. So I try to make it coincide w/normal cooking - squeezing it into weeknights with some big busy weekend days. DH picked the beans while I got other stuff ready.
For tomatoes, once we have them, a friend and I are going to have a "canning party" together to make it more fun!
I spend a fair bit of time, but I'm happy to do it and get a real sense of accomplishment from it. Pretty much every disaster preparedness guide says you should have from 2 weeks to several months of food on hand. Most people just go out and buy cans, and I thought, "can't I do better than that?" Purchasing and preserving food from the Farmer's Market is a time investment yes, but it will totally pay off when I have local, delicious, sweet fruit and vegetables in the winter. No fruit that's grown in a different hemisphere will be coming into our house this winter!
I spend probably 2-3 hours total during the weekdays either blanching and freezing veggies, dehydrating fruit, or making pesto. I make and freeze 2 batches of pesto almost every week. For veggies, I usually buy 1 veggie a week in bulk from the Farmer's Market, and devote one weeknight to blanching and freezing it. That's usually 3-4 meals of that vegetable at a time.
Canning is an all-day endevor, so probably 4-6 hours each time. So far we've canned strawberry jam, pickles, cherries, and sliced peaches. For the jam we did a "canning party" with a friend from the Farmer's Market, it was really fun! We're going to do the same thing to make tomato sauce.
i take a whole day to deal with strawberries. My sister and I go to a place we can pick them and then we freeze and make jam all afternoon. I usually spend a few evenings in the summer preserving tomatoes too . I just boil them quick to remove the skins and then freeze them. I would like to start preserving more foods, but it is time consuming.
Probably 4-6 hours a week. I have been doing a lot of canning this year. I have canned mulberry jam, maraschino cherries, blueberry syrup, bar-le-duc, sauerkraut will be canned tomorrow, blueberry and basil vinegar will be canned tomorrow as well. Tomatoes will probably be my next big project. I also freeze stuff.