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!
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!
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.
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.
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!
@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.
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.
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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).
@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.
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'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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And I figured its cheaper to just buy the damn beer at the store.
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You're lucky you have a partner!
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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.
08/13/09
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.
08/13/09
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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08/13/09
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.
08/13/09
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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*I am such a fuckin bumpkin sometimes.
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