… Boiling Sterilizes
(c) 2020, Davd
Eating is more expensive suddenly, and we can’t trust fresh vegetables. In grocery store produce sections and online-shopping warehouses, we are warned, “people are touching your food before you touch your food.” That has always been the case, except for gardening your own; but until last month people were touching other people, handshakes especially. Now we are told to stay 6 feet or 2 metres apart. (Try eating vegetables without coming closer to them than 2 metres?)
Some of the people who touched your food are foreigners, when “fresh” vegetables means trucked north from somewhere on one side or the other of the US-Mexican border. The US has more virus cases in percentage terms, than Canada1.
My eating strategy this winter starts with canned tomatoes, because they are canned when recently picked (thus, more nutritious than tomatoes picked green and trucked, can be.) The canning process would destroy virus riding on the tomatoes2. Canned tomatoes need no special storage media like refrigerators, freezers, or even root cellars.
If you have a root cellar, next come beets, cabbage, carrots, onions, and turnips. Those vegetables are sold in stores, but if they come from stores, “people [strangers] are touching your food before you do.” The Virus Emergency news is that from stores, those vegetables are not entirely safe.
As I did last winter, I’m growing bean sprouts, which don’t need a cellar. Adding another vegetable to the list really does improve the variety experience.
Back before The Virus was dominating the news, I bought “on special”, a 10-kg bag of dried whole yellow peas. Early this month, I opened that bag and soaked two cups of them, as I did with dried whole green peas last spring. Then I proceeded to cook them with carrots, “like last year“.
They were good. I’d rather have used green dried peas, maybe .. but these were good. Along with barley and canned diced tomatoes, those peas and carrots made a protein balanced, meatless, satisfying meal. If green dried peas might have been slightly preferable to yellow, barley is definitely preferable to white rice.
Last year, I published the technique for a diversity vegetable dish during the “hungry gap”. This year, with grocery stores suspected as possible carriers of a virus much deadlier than ‘flu, it’s also a prudence vegetable.
This is frugal food. It can add welcome variety of taste and texture, and nutrition, to a drab winter diet. It’s also a way to avoid the dangers of touching food that strangers have touched.
Notes:
