House Tour: The Larder

**We moved in November and we are just now starting to get situated and unpacking all of the stuff we brought with us.  Not just unpacking, but making it our home.  Here's a virtual tour:

We have a room in our house we call the "larder" or the "fruit room".  I'm trying to call it the larder because it contains so much more than fruit.  

This is the view from the door.  The freezer contains our personal meat/frozen food supply.

I'll give you a tour of the larder, but late winter is the wrong time to show it.  We've been eating a lot of this food over the winter!!  So, this is the inventory as of the middle of February....

This is our jelly/jam shelf.  There's chokecherry, plum, peach, blueberry, jalapeno, strawberry.

It's also the syrup shelf:  plum and blueberry -- both excellent on pancakes and waffles.  

I will probably make syrup this year, but no more jelly/jam (unless the chokecherries bear well, then we ALWAYS make more chokecherry jelly).

Pickled good are on top of this shelf.  Cucumber pickles, relishes, bread and butter pickles, pickled beets.  My dear Hubby does not like my pickled beets.  He likes his mother's recipe.  I didn't know this when I pickled bushels of beets two year ago.  Therefore, I eat a lot of pickled beets.  (He also doesn't like bread and butter pickles...oh well, more for me!)  The empty shelf will be canned beans, it's on my list to do!

This is a tomato shelf.  On the top left is quarts of ketchup, then yellow salsa, red salsa and BBQ sauce on the right.  The second shelf is quarts of tomato sauce on the left and spaghetti sauce on the right.  I obviously did not make enough spaghetti sauce or pizza sauce...I'm out!

Fruit on the top shelf:  Applesauce on the left (We thought we were out of applesauce so finding these jars when we unpacked was a pleasant surprise.  All of our kids loved applesauce as a baby food, especially mixed with other foods, so we used a lot of it.  Usually I'm gifted with pails and pails of apples in the fall, but this years crop did not do well so NO APPLES and no applesauce for this house in 2012.), sliced peaches in the middle and pitted cherries on the right.

The bottom shelf is canned veggies:  sauerkraut on the left and peas next door.

This shelf is meat and meals-in-jar:  on top is some pints of ham and a lone quart of chicken broth.  I usually can meat in March and April, cleaning out the freezer for new meat coming in the summer and fall.  Plus, that's when I have time to do it.  It's also the time I can a lot of meals in a jar to have ready for the summer months.  Right now, the second shelf holds soups:  split pea, white chicken chili, bean with ham, vegetable and tomato.  Great for a quick, hot winter lunch!

(The shelf behind this one contains some tools and such from Hubby's repair work and our honey supply.)

This is my purchased items storage.  

I bless my dad for adding this little door when he built this basement in the late '80s.  This gem opens to a root cellar where we can store potatoes, onions, garlic, squashes, cabbages, etc.  It needs to be swept out and then we'll be ready for the fall.

The lower shelves of each unit contain empty jars.

During the spring, summer and fall they will be filled with good food for my family to eat.

That concludes our tour of the larder!