Why Fermenting Wins in My Book!

  Perhaps it is a little backwards that when it comes to food preservation, beyond freezing everything, I jumped into fermenting before canning.  While they both have their benefits I will ALWAYS choose to ferment and freeze before I can and here is why:

  #1  You have a nutritious food that you can pack even more nutrition into and make all of the nutrients more readily available for your body.

  #2  The food is alive!!!!  Not only is it alive, it is filled with wonderful colonies of bacteria that will do wonders for your health.

  #3  You know if it has gone bad.  This is a really important factor for me!  When you ferment and it goes bad, man I think everyone on your block knows that it has gone bad!  There is no mistaking it, I have never thought "Wow, that smells terrible perhaps I should take a taste just to make sure."  When I first started to look up canning online of course the first thing that came up was botulism...guess what the water bath canner that I had just purchased went into storage for that entire first summer.  No way was I going to dive into something that could result in a deadly bacteria that I can't even smell.  Ask my family about how I cooked my first few chickens after I gave up my vegetarian ways.  I hadn't cooked meat in about 10 years and I was sure they would all fall over ill from salmonella so I cooked those first few birds until they were bone dry.

 I think we all remember this image from National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation...

this is what my first chicken looked like.

  Anyway, I have gotten over my fears of cooking meat with the help of a great meat thermometer, but my fear of canning still sticks with me.  This summer, for example, I received in a trade from a member of our community garden about 10lbs of pickling cucumbers.  I came home with this beautiful box of cucumbers and my husband started drooling.  He begged me not to "ruin them with fermentation" and asked that I save a portion to be pickled and canned the way his mom used to do.  While I was quite insulted, I did agree.  Even though I know in my head that these pickles have been processed properly and come on, they are sitting in so much vinegar that nothing could possibly live in that jar, they still make me nervous!  Each new can of pickles that we open I insist on eating one and not allowing the kids to have any until 24 hours later.  I am not even sure if botulism would make me sick within that time frame but some how in my head it makes sense.  My husband said that I just might be crazy enough to take on a job as a food tester for royalty to make sure that their food has not been poisoned...do they still hire for that position?  I bet it pays more than Kohl's!

This is the most recently opened jar.  I tried a pickle before dinner (it was insanely yummy and crunchy), so if I haven't fallen ill in the next 17 hours I will allow the kids to enjoy them as well.  Yes, don't judge me, I already know that I have issues.