Canning 101

Never ever did I dream that I would be taking a canning class!!  That is another one of those unexpected things that has come into my life as a result of Mr.   He has a garden.  He loves his garden.  He works hard in his garden.  Of course, you know what that equals.

One day he looked at me and suggested that I can all this garden stuff.  "CAN?" I said.   This was followed by uproarious laughter on my part and a puzzled sober looking face on his part.  Somehow, we just weren't following each other's line of thinking.

I had to let that whole idea wander around in my brain awhile.  I think the biggest selling point was the green beans I ate during the winter.  They were home canned, and they were yummy... really yummy.

So... I took a giant step and mentioned to Mr. that I might try canning.  That lit up his eyes.  I'm not going to jump right into a big production, but will actually try a little canning.  My mind went to all the horror stories I could think of about unsafe foods.  I opted immediately to obtain help and information.

I went to Nearby City to the Agriculture Building.  You've got to love Extension Services.  They do all kinds of wonderful things, and I was about to learn Canning 101... my name, not theirs.

So... here is the class.  Since those yummy green beans aren't quite ready for canning, we started with other foods.  Carrots was first on the list.  I'm telling you that I don't have a fondness for carrots, but the class did carrots.  I can use them in stew at some point.  Who knows, I might just can a few more for the sake of having them on my shelf when I want to make something with carrots.  At least I can do something with them and learned a lot of little canning tricks with this pressure cooking lesson.

Here are the little dears all sitting in the pot ready to put the lid on and get started.

The fire is going, the pressure cooker is going to do its job!

It may not look like much, but it certainly took awhile for all of us to get our carrots to this point.
Trust me, canning can be labor intensive.  There are no shortcuts that I can see.  It is either right or not.

Our instructor is pointing out a few things to some of the gals.

She was really nice, and very patient with us.  You could tell that she knew what she was doing.  That gave us confidence.

After lunch, we started in on canning apples.  We did those in a hot water pack... no pressure cooker. I know Mr. is going to be happy about apples.

After all was said and done, each of us had our two little jars that we canned.

Ah, carrots...

Ah, Ah, apples.   Now, I can really see some advantage to this apple canning.  I'm picturing pie and cobbler in our future.

I'm sure my good friends Grace and Juju are going to have a real struggle imagining me with a pressure cooker dashing about my kitchen in canning mode.  It just goes to show you that you never know what you will do for your man.   Tah Dah