Deb’s Pantry

10/14/2026

A woman who puts up sixty jars before October ends is not playing house.

She is the only person on her street who has already bought groceries through April.

Sixty jars sounds like a lot until you do the math. A case of twelve jars costs around eight dollars to fill with tomatoes you grew or bought at the end of season market price. That same food on a grocery shelf in February costs three to four times more. Sixty jars, canned at home, can represent three hundred dollars or more in future grocery money already spent at the lowest price of the year.

Water bath canning is entry level. No pressure canner required. High acid foods only: tomatoes, fruit, pickles, jams, pie fillings, salsa. A jar of crushed tomatoes processes in forty five minutes. A jar of peach jam in ten. The equipment pays for itself inside one season and lasts decades.

She did not call it food security. She called it putting up the harvest before frost.

10/11/2026

There was no freezer, no money for store goods, and no fresh pumpkin left anywhere in the county, and yet there was pumpkin pie in that house in March. 🎃

The secret was hanging right over the cookstove. In October, when the pumpkins and cushaws came in from the cornfield, women peeled them, cut them crosswise into rings about a finger thick, scraped out the seeds, and slid the rings onto a long smooth pole or a length of string. The pole went up above the stove or near the fireplace, where warm, dry air rose all day long.

Over a few weeks the bright orange rings shrank and darkened into tough, leathery amber circles that knocked together when somebody bumped the pole. 🍂 Children remember the smell, sweet and a little earthy, filling the whole kitchen while they dried. Once they were done, the rings came down and were stored in a cloth sack or a crock in a dry place.

Come winter, a handful of rings went into a pot of water to soak and stew soft again. Then they became pie, stewed pumpkin sweetened with a little sorghum, or a sweet side dish next to soup beans and cornbread. The same trick was used on apples, beans and peppers, and every family had its own opinion about the right way to do it. 🥧

What looks like a decoration was really a pantry. It was a family using fire, air and time to make one harvest stretch across the hungriest months of the year, without spending a penny.

Those rings on the pole are a reminder that our grandmothers were food scientists long before anybody used the words, and every pumpkin pie made in their tradition carries a little of that winter in it.

10/11/2026

Before anybody in the mountains owned a freezer, women had already figured out how to keep sliced apples white, sweet and soft all the way to spring. 🍏

It was called sulfuring, or bleaching, and it worked like a small chemistry lesson in the back yard. Apples were peeled and cut into slices or quarters and laid in a clean barrel, a big crock or a tight wooden box. Down inside went a saucer with a lump of sulfur on it. The sulfur was lit, the container was covered tight with a quilt or a lid, and the fumes went to work for hours. When it was opened up, the apples looked almost exactly like they did the day they were picked. The sulfur fumes stopped them from turning brown, kept bugs and mold away and let them be stored in a crock for months. Unlike dried apples, which shrank down hard and leathery on the roof or a string, sulfured apples stayed plump and soft. ❄️

All winter long, a woman could reach into that crock and pull out apples for fried pies, sauce, cobbler and stack cake fillings that tasted closer to fresh than anything else in the house. When the root cellar was running low and the dried beans were getting old, that crock of pale apples was a little bit of October in the middle of February.

It took real judgment to do it right. Too little sulfur and the apples spoiled. Too much and they tasted harsh. The women who were good at it were known for it, and their apple dishes showed it. Daughters stood beside their mothers at the barrel and learned the timing by watching.

Did anybody in your family sulfur apples every fall, or did they always dry them instead? 🧺

06/27/2026

Giardiniera……
yes or no?

05/07/2026

Can you say Kosher?
17 pints and 1.2 gallon.

05/04/2026

You either love it or hate it.
14 pints of pickled okra today.

04/27/2026

Second day of canning. Yesterday pickles today kraut.

04/27/2026

First canning of the 2026 year. Kosher pickles.

09/30/2025