It's not all about the cleaning

It's also about the food.

Jam, Jelly, Pickles, Peppers, Tomatoes.....

I'm a bit of a f-r-e-a-k.

Canning is an art....and given I can't draw stick people, it's an art form that surprisingly suits 'me'.  Unfortunately, other than the token strawberry jam, it seems many people don't really can their food like the old days.  Canning and preserving food is a ritual and is so serene to me.  Spending hours in front of a hot stove on a hot summer day gives me an inner peace that nothing else can (pardon the pun).

I didn't always 'can' food but I've been cooking and baking as long as I can remember.  My grandmother and I would spend hours in her tiny kitchen making jam, spagetti sauce, baking christmas cookies, rolling rum balls and perfecting her cheesecake.  The jam ended up in jars in the freezer (yeah, my grandfather pulled out a jar of jam from 1993 the other day.  He says it was perfect.  There is no way I would even try it.)  It's hard to explain my grandfather when it comes to food - pretty much he will eat anything....no matter how old, how freezer burnt or how unidentifiable it may be.  I love him more than anything....... but that's just weird.  His rules??? Don't ask him to eat peanut butter on anything other than toast.  Bananas will only be bought at $0.29/lb even if he has to drive across the city to get them.  Habitant Pea Soup is fantastic and Kraft dinner will never go bad.  I love that man.

This year I had BIG plans.  My new home has a huge yard and given we live a town over from the closest grocery store I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to beg convince my husband to build me the vegetable garden beds I always wanted.  I wanted 4, he wanted 1, we settled in 3....with the proviso that there was room for a 4th if we need it.

The 4th will be made this fall.

The garden beds were made last fall and filled with compost/earth and they sat until spring.  I spent a fair amount of time during the winter looking up varieties of seeds and deciding what I would put where in each garden.  In february I ordered the seeds and in March they were started indoors.  Rows upon rows of little seedings began to pop up.  It was beautiful.

Then the seedlings died.

Not so beautiful.

Seriously??  Where did I go wrong??

I have no idea - so when the earth was warm enough to work and the danger of frost had passed I made a trip to the local nursery (local meaning 35 minutes away) and picked up some tomatoes, peppers and whatever other starter veggie plants I could find.  After carefully plotting and planting my veggies, I planted the remaining seeds from the packages in rows, marked everything and waited.

My garden turned out beautifully.  The tomatoes were 6 bloody feet tall and although the strawberries didn't produce more than 5 berries all year long, they took over the entire garden.  The onions were sweet, the cucumbers and zucchinis were bountiful.  The ground cherries are amazing and the beets were an epic failure because they were overtaken by the ground cherries.  The carrots were ok but too close together to grow much, the leeks never showed up, the potatoes are not ready yet and the herbs were friggin amazing!!!! I learned many lessons over the course of the first season of these gardens and I know what I will and will not plant next year.  The 4th bed will be built later this month and next year I will have more space and will re-arrange things to maximize efficiency and solve some issues.  I'm already starting to put the gardens to bed for the year and have begun the pick out the new varieties of seeds for next year....I'm looking for more heirloom and organic items for next year as I'm confident now as to what works best in our garden.

Back to canning.

June is the first real opportunity to get down and dirty into canning.  STRAWBERRIES!!!!  Around here, mid-June to mid-July is strawberry season.  The first day the fields were open, we took the kids out and picked 2 4litre baskets of berries.  I wanted more, the kids were tired, the kids won, we left.

I have tried freezer jam, cooked jam with sugar, cooked jam without sugar, cooked jam with no pectin and this is what works best for me.

I usually do one batch of "no pectin" Strawberry jam - it really is amazing....but the kids love the thicker one I make which has the pectin in it.

One note here.....sometimes the fruit in the jam floats.  It's not a big deal.  It doesn't change the taste of it, it just may not look as pretty.  I. Don't. Care. anymore.

Strawberry Jam

Ingredients

·      6 cups strawberries (hulled, washed and crushed)

·      4.5 cups of sugar

    1 package fruit pectin

Directions

1.     Pour strawberries into a large dutch oven.

2.     Bring to a boil.

3.     Add the pectin and bring back to a boil.  Boil hard for 1 minute, stirring constantly.

4.     Remove from heat.  Stir for 5 minutes to prevent fruit from floating and skim off foam as needed.

5.     Pour into pre-sterilized jars.

6.     Process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. 
      Remove from water, let sit undisturbed for 24 hours. 

Yield

·      6 cups