Transcript
My name is Eva Rabi, and I'm Jason Rabbi, my husband, and we picked up preservation with the OSU Extension folks here in Warm Springs. We started attending preservation classes with Sarah, yes, it was Sarah and Rosanna, and it just took off and flourished from there. I did the preservations of the jams, the pickling, and canned salmon in times of emergencies. It's wonderful to have our preserved foods and then also just traditionally keeping our foods traditional. The biggest impact is I know what goes into my foods and the love and the care that went into it. I think it's wonderful, so I think that's just great, and it tastes better. It tastes way better than store-bought, it sure does, it's way better. Following the seasons, I think, is just wonderful. The gathering, we keep things local here, and we do most of our gathering from Mount Hood with the Hood River. We go there and collect most of our fruit with the u-picks.
Yes, that's good to share, yes, it's good to share for birthdays, holidays, and just gifting to friends. It's wonderful, and I love doing it. Yes, my husband is involved as well as my daughter. My daughter and my son-in-law do a lot of hands-on, and it's great, and they're also out there helping us pick and gather, and it's wonderful, and it is a wonderful family time. I'm also teaching my daughter as she's helping, so it's wonderful. I hope she picks up on it. I enjoy helping. I just, you know, it's probably, like I said, the most rewarding thing ever is being able to eat my own product that we've preserved and, you know, and get all the compliments on how good it is, yeah, or sister Whitney, you know, yeah, her how to can. Yeah, I was getting a lot of calls from my sister, which is fine. I love guiding her through it, so I tell her, yay, when you're done, honey, let's have some and share. Oh, it is very rewarding, yes, yes. I love the OSU Extension folks here that were able to take advantage of the program and learn and be able to preserve all our wonderful foods. Rosanna and Sarah are our wonderful guidance. If I ever come up with anything or a question, and yes, it's great, and I'm just so thankful that they're here, and I cannot wait for things to pick back up so I would love to come to classes again.
My name is Whitney Kalama. I learned about food preservation with OSU Extension about, I want to say, 2014, and Sarah and I think it was Dana, they worked together, and they taught us how, and I did class with my cousin, and Eva, she's the one that kind of roped me in like, let's go together and, you know, we're family, so we need to learn how to continue to preserve our traditional foods, and ever since then, I've just been really intrigued and doing a lot. It started in about 2014 too, I worked with the Culture and Heritage Department, and it started out with our cultural foods. I guess for me and my wife, it's just been going through the whole process and doing it together from beginning to the ending, and it's helped us a lot with preserving our food. Our main ones are traditional foods, so those are the things that we love to do. We've come to do it together, I guess, and it's become a family thing. If I'm not confident in it, I always turn to my cousin Eva or Sarah because she always says I'm just a message away, you know, if you have a question, if you're second-guessing yourself, by all means, ask, you know, so I love Sarah's availability for that.
She always answers right away, but I think I'm more confident in sharing because I did do the classes, so definitely, the class is very, very much so helped me when we do our own canning for preserving compared to when we go out to maybe to the stores and buy our foods. It's a whole lot different. There's a difference between the taste with preservation. It keeps that natural taste and has the natural ingredients in there with our natives, you know, those are the things that we preserve, and it's basic huckleberries, and we do sturgeon and salmon, and my wife, she likes to do the roots and stuff like that too, compared to drying from our old ways to our nowadays preserving, and it really helps, you know, with that taste of freshness, a lot more enjoyable too when you eat your food, you know because you did your prep, you did everything, you know, you're taking care of it yourself, and you know, you know it's trusting and it's healthy too. My sister, my cousin, she's actually a master canner, and she always gives us like jam or pickles or pie filling, and you know, she just goes above and beyond, and she does a lot, and she always just like, oh, I just need my jar back, and so now I catch myself saying that I need my darn back, though, so I definitely understand, you know, it's a good feeling to give back and to share, you know, Facebook's a big thing, they're like, oh, I got this canned salmon, and you know, it makes Elders happy, it was the joy that they have on their faces that gave me the most satisfaction, I think a lot of people are curious about it, and hopefully, you guys can do some more classes, you know, maybe outside or something with COVID, I know it's hard, but I know that the interest is there.
My name is Roxanna Bisland. I actually heard about this, I first saw it on Facebook, there was a post about, you know, hey, we're going to be doing garden kits if you're interested, you know, here fill out this form and submit it, and then we'll get back to you. We do a lot, we've actually planted a lot of things that we've never planted before because I think this was the first year we tried lettuce, we did onions which we don't eat them so we just, we grow a lot and we end up giving a lot of it away to help out other families and just trying new, yeah, a whole bunch of new vegetables because it is, you know, we live so far out that we don't have a grocery store to go to, so I grow, I don't know, four different varieties of tomatoes, I do a lot of squashes and zucchinis, and we've tried new varieties this year. I mean, even tried different cucumbers and actually canned a lot this year compared to what we've ever done before. My daughter's actually the one doing it, she's like, hey, can I can this? I'm like, okay, go for it, try it out, so we're doing a lot more canning and learning how to make foods with whatever we've been growing. A lot of vines in my backyard, so tomatoes, tomatillos, bell peppers, jalapenos, you know, you name it, we've been trying the
different varieties of the peppers. So getting my kids outside, it's been really nice, they want to get out there, they want to see where things are at, and hey, can we try this next year? Like, all right, it's been really nice, and especially being able to share whatever we grow because we grow more than what we can actually eat, you know, help out co-workers like, hey, you want some of this? Like, okay, so it's been, it's been a really nice experience for my family to be able to do this.
