If you grew up preparing food to store for a winter season, you may know the term “putting food by.”  This term is often used to refer to canning food or preparing crops for the root cellar.

However, in my grandmother’s and mother’s day, putting food by also meant freezing food.  Which leads me to the reason I’m putting freezer cooking, old fashioned cooking, and The Hillbilly Housewife together.

I was introduced to a website called TheHillbillyHousewife.com first by my daughter, Nicole Dean, internet marketing guru.  I thought she was trying to show me some new-fangled gadgetry website thingy that I knew I wouldn’t understand.  But the name Hillbilly Housewife?  That name didn’t fit exactly into Nicole’s niche of internet marketing stuff.  But, I clicked on TheHillbillyHousewife.com anyway and was ready to check it out.

The first thing that struck me was the image.  There stands a woman wearing an apron, tending to a pot of coffee on a very old fashioned kitchen stove.  That scene could have easily come right out of any family scene I remember from, oh… decades and decades ago.  My grandmothers, my mother, my aunts… all these women in my memory, any one of them could have been that woman in the picture.

That image warmed my heart and I immediately had an affinity with this website, and the person responsible for it, Susanne Myers.

What kept me going back to visit TheHillbillyHousewife was the simplicity.  The information, stories, recipes, and topics of discussion sound like the women of my memory;  women gathered in the kitchen, trying to figure out how to blanch corn, how to save money, how to plant peas, how to season cast iron, how to get grease out, how to make curtains, and all those things that make a household run smoothly.

Now, I know what inspired me to go back to visit TheHillbillyHousewife over and over again.  After all, I know my history.  But, what I wondered was:

1) What history does Susanne have with the women in her family that inspires her to write such an old fashioned website?  And,

2) Apart from making meal time easier with a freezer full of food, does the concept of  “putting food by” as a hedge against winter, inflation, or hardship inspire any of Susanne’s writing?

Rather than wonder, why don’t I just pose these two questions to Susanne.  So, without further ado, I present Susanne Myers, The Hillbilly Housewife.

Patti: “Welcome to my blog, Susanne.”

Susanne: “Hi Patti, first of all thank you for having me here on RemarkableWrinklies.com. I love your blog and the fresh perspective you offer. And also thank you for recommending my freezer cooking ebook. I’m glad you are enjoying it as much as I am.”

Patti: “You are welcome, and thank you for coming!  If you would, could you tell us in your own words how you would describe your inspiration for The Hillbilly Housewife.  I suspect you were surrounded by some remarkable women in your life; women who created the sort of home that we would describe now as old fashioned.”

Susanne: “You are so perceptive Patti … yes, my inspiration for the Hillbilly Housewife website comes from some amazing women in my own family and that of my husband. I have learned so much from my own grandmothers and my husband’s “Grandma Griffin”. I greatly admire all three of them. They are (and were – one of my grandmothers passed away almost a year ago) hard working women who always “made do” with what they had on hand. Each of them had 4 or more children and a large house and garden (and in one case an entire farm) to take care of. Money was often tight, and most food was cooked from scratch and most of the vegetables and fruit they grew and preserved themselves.

After I got married and had my daughter, I noticed that there were a lot of skills I was forgetting and I had quite a few friends who never learned how to make bread or cook a pot of stew from scratch. Old fashioned homemaking and home-cooking is becoming a bit of a lost art. The website is my little contribution to make sure these skills don’t become forgotten. Yes, the site is a bit old fashioned and most of the topics certainly are, but at the same time, they are useful to us today just as much as they were to our grandmothers when they were young women.

Yes, we have other options these days that include premade meals and convenience foods we can pick up at the store and of course plenty of restaurants. At the same time, we pay for that convenience and it isn’t always the healthiest food. I know I feel better knowing I can make a batch of cornbread and chili from scratch, even if I don’t do it every week and it’s just as easy (and actually more environmentally friendly and more effective) to scrub my kitchen sink with baking soda instead of a harsh chemical cleaner. My point is that yes, the site is a bit old fashioned, but the information is just as applicable today as it was 50 years ago.”

Patti: “You are exactly right – old fashioned never goes out of style, as strange as that seems.  How about the concept of “putting food by” as a hedge against winter, inflation, or hardship; does that idea inspire any of your writing?”

Susanne: “Yes, it sure does. We have gone through some tough financial times where I wasn’t sure where to get the money to go to the grocery store that week. Having a freezer full of food gives me a feeling of security that no matter what my daughter will not go hungry. It’s also nice to know these meals are there in case I get sick. I had a bad case of the flu earlier this winter and my husband isn’t a big cook. It was nice to know that he could just pull a casserole out of the freezer and heat it up. It gave me the peace of mind to just relax and allow my body to heal instead of trying to push myself too soon into getting up, heading to the store and cooking dinner.

Along the same lines, it is nice to have a few meals in the freezer that I can share with a family member, friend or neighbor if and when it is needed there.”

Thanks to Susanne Myers for taking time from her extremely busy schedule to answer a few questions from this humble blogger.  I hope you enjoy visiting The Hillbilly Housewife as much as I do!

p.s.  Now that you’ve gotten a chance to “meet” Susanne, take a look at the Freezer Cookbook that inspired me to ask Susanne about her inspiration.  Click on the picture below and see if you think this might not be something you can use for yourself – or for a gift!

During two decades of fascination with space exploration and all things lunar, the public was sold the dream of cooking just like the astronauts, and won’t that be keen?!  Hey, we drank Tang by the gallons because the astronauts did… you youngsters just don’t get it.

Once this space age method of cooking started to catch on, there was no stopping it.  By the mid 1970′s microwave ovens, first sold as the Radarange, were outselling traditional gas ovens.  Is this a good thing?  I don’t know.  Is the microwave oven handy?  I guess so.  Can you cook a meal in a microwave oven that looks like the pictures on the cookbooks?  The jury is still out.  Don’t get me wrong; I have a microwave and I’ve been known to use it.  Still…

I understand that there is a lot of evidence by scientists and nutritionists that microwaving our food may not leave all the food intact, nutritionally speaking.  Take, for example, broccoli.

A study published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture investigated the effects of various methods of cooking broccoli. Of all the methods of preparation, microwaving caused the greatest loss in nutrients.  Quoting from the study “Clear disadvantages were detected when broccoli was microwaved, namely high losses of flavonoids (97%), sinapic acid derivatives (74%) and caffeoyl-quinic acid derivatives (87%).”  These elements are most recognizable as the things that are considered antioxidants, anti-allergic, anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory and anti-viral.  But microwaving our vegetables has become standard procedure.

And who can forget blissfully warming our baby’s bottles in the good old microwave back in the ’70′s and ’80′s?  Today?  Good Lord!  No one would dare!

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  This is again so true.  I’m sure Mr. Spencer did a good thing when he figured out how to bombard our food with microwaves.  There are probably many “spin off” inventions that really do benefit humankind – perhaps in the field of medicine.

As for me, when I have a plate of food to heat up, a cup of coffee to reheat, or some vegetables to cook, I’ll choose the old fashioned way once again.  There’s nothing wrong with using real heat to make food hot.

Call me crazy, but I want to eat food that hasn’t been bombarded, thank you very much.