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Can It: Home-Preserving Expensive, Nightmarish, Very Big Amongst Young Set
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southernbitch
10/01/09

In reply to K8 Hardy Makes Fashion Arty, Fun
mmm, as someone who tends to not really care how i dress too much because i have, well, other things to think about, my reaction is whatever. you judge me on my clothes, i'll judge you on your pretentious attitude. we'll meet in the middle!
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stacyinbean
10/01/09

In reply to K8 Hardy Makes Fashion Arty, Fun
"This blanket expression that you shouldn't judge a person by the fact that there is a number in her name is ridiculous to me."
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sympathyforthebasementcat
10/01/09

In reply to K8 Hardy Makes Fashion Arty, Fun
I thought K8 Hardy was the new name of Jon & Kate + 8 for a minute. It kind of made sense.
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redqueenmeg
08/17/09

In reply to Can It: Home-Preserving Expensive, Nightmarish, Very Big Amongst Young Set
My grandmother's cousin was permanently scarred and lost most of her jaw as a child from an explosion during a canning or preserve-making accident. Our whole family has run screaming from the prospect of the process ever since!
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dirtybee
08/13/09

In reply to Can It: Home-Preserving Expensive, Nightmarish, Very Big Amongst Young Set
I tried making my own beer once. It's probably just as difficult and time consuming as this :(
And I figured its cheaper to just buy the damn beer at the store.
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funnyface
08/13/09

In reply to Can It: Home-Preserving Expensive, Nightmarish, Very Big Amongst Young Set
While my mother has been a prize-winning canner at the county fair (her carrots, jams, salsas, and green beans were particularly popular), I have not done any canning since I've been out on my own. I did enough helping in my younger years that I know how to can, and could do it if necessary. I could do a lot of things if necessary. If there's anything this recession has taught me, it's that my weird ass hippie upbringing is actually darn practical. We grew our own food, organic of course, raised chickens for eggs, and even briefly had a family pig who later became sausage, though the tears and protests and boycotts staged by my sister and I assured that we never tried our hand at raising our own meat again. I can sew, barely, and I can make sundry beauty supplies to give out as gifts. I didn't know it then, but my family was a regular bunch of recessionistas.
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Beets.Go.On is the Fat Yogini
08/13/09

In reply to Can It: Home-Preserving Expensive, Nightmarish, Very Big Amongst Young Set
WOOOOOOOO DIY!!!! My fiance and I are making the slow transition to self-sufficiency. Within the next few years, it's our goal to get to the point where we buy nothing that is completely pre-fabricated (ie, making all of our own clothes, making all food from scratch, etc). It's an exciting adventure!
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schlegs84
08/13/09

@Beets.Go.On is one cold lady: I'm working on this myself, mostly with the bf giving me the side eye. Sometimes he's super into it (I'm noticing his enthusiam is directly related to the project's deliciousness). Homemade granola- approved, homemade bread- approved, but when I whipped out the wheat glutton to make seitan he just backed away slowly.

You're lucky you have a partner!
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schlegs84
08/13/09

@schlegs84 thinks John Galt can suck it.: glutton=gluten... whoops!
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Ratinski
08/13/09

In reply to Can It: Home-Preserving Expensive, Nightmarish, Very Big Amongst Young Set
We used to can a lot. The Day of Canning (like the Day of Reckoning, kinda) was decreed by my grandmother, generally on the hottest damn day of the summer, and she and my mother would sweat over an ancient kettle and can peaches and pears and mince pie filling and various jams and jellies and the ever-popular classic, zucchini relish.

Now my grandmother's been gone since 1995 (she passed away just two years shy of her 90th birthday) and my mother doesn't do as much canning anymore. But she still does the zucchini relish when faced with a bumper crop in her garden - this is pretty much every year, really - and everytime she does, I beg her to ship me some jars, because that shit is good, and I can't imagine making salad sandwiches or topping burgers and brats with anything else.
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msAnthrope
08/13/09

In reply to Can It: Home-Preserving Expensive, Nightmarish, Very Big Amongst Young Set
it seems though that most of the commenters make jams or relishes~~ how much of that stuff do people really eat? and as far as the vegetables, if the food needs to be boiled, how healthy is that?

i love the concept of canning; the finished product looks so competent and "craftsy" but as far as substituting for actual grocery food, i'm not understanding how one can replace the other. i don't want to eat soft vegetables and fruits year-round.
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Ratinski
08/13/09

@msAnthrope: I don't remember my mother canning a lot of vegetables - beets, yes, but otherwise mostly pickles and relishes and jams. She FROZE vegetables - that's what we did with our green bean crop - but canning, not so much.

To answer your first question, I go through enough zucchini relish in a year to use up four small jars, and I live alone. When Mom was canning for a family of five, she had to do a batch of relish every 2 years.

I don't have any homemade jams, unfortunately, but I go through the Trader Joe's stuff like candy. It gets used for everything from toast to jazzing up chicken for dinner.

As for canned vegetables replacing the grocery store - I don't think they're supposed to. Canned beets have a different taste than fresh beets, due to the sauce my mom makes to can them in - she basically makes canned Harvard beets. Consult your local Fannie Farmer cookbook for details.

But even when we were broke off our asses, a family of five canning half the summer and living off a high school teacher's salary, canned fruits and vegetables were hardly the only fruits and vegetables we ate. They weren't even the primary source, we ate fresh, we ate frozen, we ate commercially canned. Home canning was just one more option.
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TheFormerJuneBronson
08/13/09

In reply to Can It: Home-Preserving Expensive, Nightmarish, Very Big Amongst Young Set
Oh! Also, one of the houses where I give tours still has preserves in jars in the basement. The last family member died in 1969, so. Despite my antipathy to canning, I think that's fairly awesome.
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TheFormerJuneBronson
08/13/09

In reply to Can It: Home-Preserving Expensive, Nightmarish, Very Big Amongst Young Set
My mom used to can a lot when I was a kid, usually things I found inedible like sweet mixed pickles (as a rule, I only like dill). She made some jams that were good, though we were always bothered (in a way that now bothers me that it bothered me) that they weren't the same cheerful colors as what you buy in the store. Evidently the redness of strawberry jam is a factor in the flavor to me. For my mother, I think it was a factor in a certain 1970s feminist/organic/ex-hippie thing that I find hard to define, but which shaped my whole childhood. She always had a big garden and would take us berry-picking in the woods. We lived in a wooded area that had a lot of wild-berry bushes. It was comfortably farm-y for the huge Little House fan that I was.

As for me, I like knowing that I probably could make jam or can vegetables if I wanted to, but I'll have to be pushed to do it by necessity. It's time-consuming, as well as messy and expensive, and canned vegetables are nowhere near as good to me as frozen.
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mishaps
08/13/09

In reply to Can It: Home-Preserving Expensive, Nightmarish, Very Big Amongst Young Set
Canning is insanely time-consuming, and it requires you to heat up the kitchen something fierce on a summer day, but "nightmarish"? Come on.

With a broad-mouth funnel and one of those jar lifters (total cost: $3, years ago), I have never had any difficulty with the actual process, or with the clean-up. And I get delightful things like low-sugar blueberry jam (the last batch; one for the fridge, one for a hostess gift, the rest are on a top shelf in my kitchen).
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Sadie
08/13/09

@mishaps: I think the space constraints of my NYC kitchen add to the nightmarish quality. Yes, having picked a peck of peaches yesterday, I stand by the characterization.
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Spaceman Bill Leah
08/13/09

In reply to Can It: Home-Preserving Expensive, Nightmarish, Very Big Amongst Young Set
Sending emil to mom asking to ship me her old canning stuff. Good lord, I used to win prizes at the county fair* for this shit. I may as well make it work in my favor.

*I am such a fuckin bumpkin sometimes.
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Plum-Pie
08/13/09

In reply to Can It: Home-Preserving Expensive, Nightmarish, Very Big Amongst Young Set
I've just finished the hugely enjoyable 'The Egg and I' by Betty MacDonald who has some pretty caustic things to say about canning. ([en.wikipedia.org])
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Casquivana
08/13/09

In reply to Can It: Home-Preserving Expensive, Nightmarish, Very Big Amongst Young Set
Sadie, you would have died of happiness in the home of an old lady who was my mother's friend's mother-in-law. She lived in a rather remote area of what is already a geographically isolated region, where there are the type of winters that preclude you from going anywhere, in the kind of place where you could only arrive by horse, train, and light aircraft (actually, I think that's still the case). The first time we visited, my mom's friend announced that my mother was a weirdo who liked to make her own apple sauce and peach jam from scratch, so old little lady showed us her special pantry. Two whole rooms next to a rather large kitchen full of all sorts of preserves, where nothing was spared. Nothing. She was very short, so her son had built her ladders and steps so she could reach absolutely all shelves, which went from floor to ceiling, and every single visitor always left with a basket full of jars with the most unusual concoctions. Every type of fruit, nut, herb, seed, meat and spice was used. Since she liked my mother, we left with three cranes full of jars of all sizes, a notebook with recipes and a whole basket of some apple-and-walnut purée for me, since I decided I wouldn't eat anything else ever again. When she died, I think my mother was more devastated than her friend. She has pictures of that pantry, I'm not kidding.
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