'Putting food by' -- worth the time or not?
Posted
Sep 08 2008, 12:21 PM
by
Donna Freedman
Rating:
I spent Saturday afternoon in the kitchen turning free fruit into food for the winter. Sitting on my countertop are nine pints of home-canned pears, six jars of apple butter, and five jars of plum-pear jam.
I have enough apples left to make about four quarts of applesauce, but I'm going to wait until the last of the pears ripen. That way, I'll be able to process both fruits in the water-bath canner simultaneously. I got the apples and pears by putting a note on Freecycle, asking permission to pick fruit that wasn't being harvested by homeowners. A neighbor allowed me to pick plums -- I still have about 15 pounds of them to deal with -- and for the past few weeks I'd been picking blackberries around the corner from my apartment.
Saturday's experiment in urban gleaning cost me $13.20 for sugar, jar lids, one box of pectin and the gas to drive to pick the fruit. I'm not sure how much it cost to run the stove on high for 20 minutes and to run a slow cooker for seven hours. Not much, I expect, since my average electric use is 39 cents a day and I make most of my meals at home.
From a strictly cash standpoint, I'm coming out ahead. Buying nine cans of pears would cost $18.81 at a local supermarket, and my jars have lots more fruit in them than Del Monte's cans contain. In addition, there are those 11 jars of jam and apple butter to eat and give as gifts. (Some will go to the folks who gave me the fruit.)
I can hear people wailing, "But what about the cost of your time?" That's a complicated question. Short-form answer: I enjoyed every minute of the fruit-picking and the canning, so I consider it entertainment.
Plus I learned a new skill: how to make apple butter in a slow cooker, although I chose a different recipe than Stephanie at Stop the Ride! used.
Small effort, big savings
Jam-making isn't hard. From crushing the fruit to cooking to canning to cleanup, it takes me less than an hour. And boy, does it make my apartment smell delicious.
In the past couple of weeks I'd made blackberry and plum jams without commercial pectin, using sugar I bought on sale. (I had to buy one box of pectin for the pear-plum, since I couldn't find a recipe for that kind of jam made without it.) I put the jams up with canning lids I got for a song at a yard sale earlier this summer. I'm not counting the cost of jars, since I mostly reused ones I've had for years. If I were keeping track, the jars cost about a nickel apiece.
Thus a small batch (four half-pints) of that plum or blackberry jam cost me about 24 to 29 cents per jar. Half a pint may not sound like much, but homemade jam is intensely flavorful and a little goes a long way.
In other words, when I give two or three flavors of jam as a holiday gift, I'm spending under a dollar.
Unless, of course, I factor in the value of my time.
What's it worth to you?
I agree with personal-finance blogger Dorian Wales, who wrote that people tend to overvalue their free time. Besides, it's not as though I skipped work to do this. I enjoyed the late-summer weather as I picked the fruit, and I listened to great music while I preserved it. (Thanks, KING-FM!) As a bonus, I know exactly what's in those jars: fruit and sugar and, in the case of the apple butter, cinnamon and allspice. No preservatives, no artificial coloring.
Some people would rather buy jam than make it. Heck, most of us buy stuff rather than make it. We pay someone else to raise our produce and meat, bake our bread, make our clothes, build our houses.
This much I can do. Looking at those lovely jars arrayed on my countertop makes me happy. So does the idea of giving them as gifts. Anybody can unlimber a credit card and order gift baskets online. It takes a little more effort to give a jar of pear-plum jam and a jar of apple butter plus a bag of homemade biscuit mix.
But not that much more effort. Really.
