Adventures in Home Canning

The other day Justin asked me, "Bethany, if we get married, can we have turkeys?" and I asked myself, "Who am I dating?" Actually, I didn't really ask that, but I responded with a firm no. He then asked if we could just have a chicken coop instead. Again I had to make sure that we were very clear from the outset that I am not okay with livestock in my backyard.

Justin has been reading a book called Animal, Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver which is about her family's experiment with only eating locally grown food. Since he started reading the book, he's started buying all his produce from the farmer's market--a good choice, but that's just where it started. Now he's decided to learn how to make cheese, he's considering buying a bread machine and wants to slaughter his own meat. (Man, I hope Justin is cool with me sharing his bazaar new passions in such an open forum...oh well, it's adorable, so how could he possibly object?) On top of that, he decided that he needs to learn how to can his locally grown produce himself, so we spent last Saturday in a grand canning adventure.

It started with Justin happily canning some pickles, and me excitedly peeling tomatoes.

It turns out, however, that you can only peel so many tomatoes before the joy of it wears off. We peeled a little more than 50 pounds. It also turns out that canning is kind of a messy process.




I also think that we had been a little over-zealous in the scope of our canning adventure. We decided to can pickles (6 quarts), tomatoes (7 quarts), salsa (3 quarts) and spaghetti sauce (3 quarts) and we were going to do peaches at well, but apparently peach season ended the week before and the farmer's market was fresh out of peaches. (By the way, we were very disappointed to discover that a box and a half of tomatoes only produced 3 quarts of spaghetti sauce...and this was supposed to be cost-effective?) But after 7 hours, we were pretty proud of our accomplishment. We were also very sweaty. Imagine a poorly air conditioned room on the 3rd floor with five large pots of water boiling constantly for 7 hours, and you will understand why we were sweating.



So after we finished, we started cleaning up, and for the first time in an apparently really long time, looked down at the floor. It was really dirty, so I decided to mop. The look I was going for with this picture was "Wow, that's a digustingly dirty floor. " I think the look that I actually got was "Watch me squint my eyes and show you my teeth." I guess my dreams of becoming America's next top model may not ever come to fruition.


And here's a look at how dirty the floor really was...

In the end, I think we decided that unless you grow the food yourself, it's really more cost-effective (and time-effective) to buy canned vegetables in the store. An important lesson for anyone to learn.

What random adventures have you had recently? Please share!