The Fun And Frivolity of Canning

Well, I think we're starting to see the end of our canning for this year. There's still a four liter pail of juice extracted from apples to turn into jelly but that won't be too hard. It's sitting in the fridge waiting for another day to deal with. Today I did up a pail of chokecherry juice and made six jars of jelly and three of syrup (all pint jars).

I've always struggled with making chokecherry jelly, but I learned this year I probably wasn't boiling it long enough. There are some recipes that say boil hard one minute. Uh-uh. No way. Won't work for me. Carla asked a few people this year that are boiling 15 to 30 minutes. So I tried 30. Yay! It worked! Went back to 20 and ended up with thick syrup again. Now this is with liquid pectin. We got a slightly different recipe that uses pectin crystals and after 30 minutes of boiling, I ended up with some sugar crystals in the jelly so my next batch went back to 20 minutes. I'll hope it's better.

Carla's also made some dill pickles with 20 pounds of cucumbers she got from the Hutterites at the farmers' market last week (from my brother-in-law's sister as a matter of fact). Some were jarred in quart sealers but she also made a batch just in pails. She got this recipe from my sister who made up a batch in a plastic cat litter pail (so of course I had to bug my sister about getting the litter box recipe). We haven't tried them yet, but the kids love pickles and have been bugging us to try them.

But the biggest canning issue this year has been the demise of Carla's beloved smooth-top stove. I was sterilizing jars one morning and heard a funny noise. Wasn't sure what it was...maybe just a jar with a snap lid sealing? Anyway when Carla got home from work I went baling. Later she sent me a text message saying "OMG the stove top is cracked!" Luckily this was already a 15-year-old stove but it still worked fine (well, except for the oven light but that's nothing). Guess how much to fix it. No, higher...Keep going...Right, $500! So we decided to get a new stove. For $699 plus tax (regular $849) we got a new Kenmore with coil burners since we're not giving up the canning. It was probably the heat and/or the weight of the large canner that cracked the smooth-top, something that will not affect the traditional coil burners. Plus the oven is bigger, which might be a bonus sometimes.

Hopefully we can get 15 years and more out of this stove. We replaced the dishwasher this year, too, so hopefully that's all for now! Having cloth-diapered all the kids, I ended up having to replace some plastic couplers on the washing machine between the motor and transmission several times over the years and it's kept going. Crossing my fingers!