Even though I'm known to jump on the trend train, I hate it when something I've done forever suddenly becomes the latest cool thing and I seem like just one of the nouveau crowd. Knitting was one example, except I love that there are new hip young dedicated knitters (a la Ravelry, the knitting social site, that I'm addicted to). So that's not really an example. Never mind.
What I'm referring to here is canning food. I've canned food since my twenties, when I had a weird episode making ketchup, which (ketchup) stayed around seemingly for years. It was delicious, actually - more like tomato relish/chutney with a ketchup texture. But how much ketchup does one need? We ended up ditching it in the middle of the night in the garbage. I've regularly made peach jam and tomato sauce over the years - good for Christmas gifts and makes me feel like a traditional and practical farmer's wife from the midwest, none of which I am.
So this year is no exception. Adam calls me when he has tomatoes and peaches that are no longer saleable so I have a direct pipeline to the raw foodstuffs. I've been canning the usual suspects and have branched out to the peach salsa and tomato jam shown above as variations on the theme.
"Apparently canning and preserving are back big time," Lynne Rossetto Caspar is saying, as I type this, on "The Splendid Table." How annoying, seriously.
So far I haven't sickened anyone with botulism, yet. I use the hot-water-bath method, both for the jars and myself, and that seems to work. I haven't graduated to a pressure cooker and probably won't, being one more random appliance to store. (We do have a cousin who collects them as yet another example of our family's weird collecting fetish. Though I suppose they're more useful than some of the things we hoard enjoy...)
You do have to buy some equipment as shown here, but it's a small investment for the great feeling of pride and accomplishment you get as you realize you can provide for your family in the face of the upcoming apocalypse. You'll all be scrounging for scraps, and we'll be full of tomato jam and feeling smug.
The accoutrements of canning
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