Filling mason jars with sunshine
K.J. HASCALL / Hungry Horse News
It wouldn’t be autumn without canning.
Spent Sunday afternoon with the Daily Inter Lake features editor Lynnette Hintze and her family in a very warm kitchen, a necessary inconvenience. I have to agree heartily with a sentence from “English Creek” by Ivan Doig: “We ate all winter on what my mother put up, but the price was that during a lot of the hottest days of summer the kitchen range was also blazing away.”
You won’t catch me complaining. I have this theory that the reason home-canned food tastes so good is because it’s made in the summer and early fall. In with that applesauce or salsa or pickles is the taste of summer warmth (or is that the botulism?). When sultry days are but a happy memory in the middle of January, I for one am thankful for sunshine in a jar.
And how ‘bout them apples? We canned 78 pounds of them. Lacking fruit trees to my name, I contributed a measly 15 pounds to that total. But those 15 pounds of rosy Macintosh apples now fill 10 jars. We’ll have to make more, of course. I seriously lack the self-control to ration 10 cans of applesauce to last through the winter. Can’t say I’m looking forward to slicing more apples though. My hands start cramping at the thought. You must be aware of that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, dear reader, when appraising what appears to be an endless task. So I felt while staring at a sink full of apples to be quartered and have their seeds cut out.
But our many hands made light work of the apples and our conversation passed the time so quickly five hours zipped by and we hardly noticed.
This was my second canning experience. Aforementioned editor and her husband are canning wizards and have an assembly line process down pat. In addition to applesauce, they canned peach barbecue sauce (in a word: amazing) and chicken stock. I’m learning about the craft of canning from them and hope to tackle more than just applesauce in the future. I think I’m ready to move beyond the applesauce formula of slicing, cooking, squishing, straining, cooking, dusting with sugar and cinnamon, canning.
A visit to another friend’s house yielded a view of impressive rows of canned peaches, beets and apple butter. She said that the hard work is worth it at the end of the day, when that “storing up for winter” feeling settles on a person in a cozy, self-satisfied way.