Honey

One of our pantry staples is good raw, local honey. We use a lot for a family of 4! About a gallon a year. I bake with it and I love to try different varieties of honey. Growing up, we always had the best local clover or wildflower honey, but I didn't know how different honey could be until I started working at the farmer's market for a honey stand. I enjoyed learning about the bees and how the fields the hives are in affect the flavor. Honeybees can fly up to 5 miles, so it's difficult to completely control the flavor profile, but if you place them among fields of different crops and flowers, you'll get vastly different honey based on the nectars the bees drink!

Meadowfoam and fireweed honey are beautifully light in color and flavor. Meadowfoam honey is my personal favorite; it tastes like marshmallows!

Meadowfoam honey on Amazon. Raw meadowfoam honey from the company I worked for years ago.

Clover is the most common honey variety, so that is what you may be use to. Clover, Wildflower, and Blackberry honey are medium in color. Blackberry honey has a subtle acidity to it. It is made by the bees from the nectar of the blackberry blossoms. Buckwheat honey, however, is very dark in color, almost like molasses, and has a strong earthy taste which is lovely in baked goods.

Honey lasts forever if stored correctly, so it's worth stocking up on. Store in glass and gently warm in a hot water bath to de-crystallize and return your honey to a liquid.

Also, the pollen the bees pick up on their fuzzy little bodies and track into their hives can help inoculate your immune system against the pollens locally in the air come springtime—especially those in a wildflower honey. Go online or to your local farmer's market to find a source for local honey and ask the beekeepers about where they place their hives, their practices for wintertime, and what they do to protect against harmful mites that attack honeybee colonies.

Honey is a wonderful food to source locally. One of my goals for 2026 is to source more of my food from my neighbors through local farms and producers in my community. And also by gardening at home. I love the neighborliness and the transparency that you gain by relying on one another.