Jelly Life

To be more accurate, this picture should involve more burns
and allude to an imminent invasion of sugar ants.

I had some days off around this Labor Day holiday, and decided it was going to be all projects, all the time.  That is not different from my usual free time, except this was the first four day stretch I’ve been at home in a while.  Usually I try and use vacations to – well, to go on a vacation, right?  Do something.  Go see “Jen” at her country manse, head to a cabin with friends or some hub city I don’t know much about and eat my way through their culinary footprint.

I recommend this restaurant to anyone,
and not just for the name.

Get a boozy cake, Reader.
Get them all.

This year, with the crazy whirwind marital bliss of wedding and honeymoon and Family Camp, that is the last thing on earth I want to do.  (Funny story, I still can’t talk about Thanksgiving plans even though YES OBVIOUSLY WE’RE GOING TO SEE THE FAMILY I just can’t say it out loud yet.  Dealing with my internal toddler is like trying to catch the monsters when they get out.  If you take the direct approach, your prey will bolt.  You must instead sneak up from the side, nonchalant as

Careful...she's on to you.

a summer breeze, avoiding all eye contact and pretending like you just happen to also find that patch of grass fascinating before you swoop in and, in this case, put the internal toddler into a headlock and haul her to DC for some family bonding.)

So looking at this swath of glorious free days during which I wore a bra twice, took a shower once, and checked the news not at all, I have been focused on kitchen projects.  Specifically, canning.

This lady is trying to preserve the American Way.
Also she wrote a book on freezing??

Not sure that's...nope, actually,
you know what,
no followup questions.

Canning is relevant because I’m having friends over in October to teach them how to can so it felt like maaaaybee?  It is somethiiiinnnng? I should be sure I remember how to do???  Canning is not at all difficult, but it is it’s own process and can be intimidating.  Your grandmother did it, and your great grandmother, and on back for time immemorial since long before the invention of the mason jar (1858 if you're keeping track at home) and they managed without any of today’s modern conveniences like electric kettles and gas stoves and central heating and air so that you don’t die in your sweltering kitchen, so I promise it really is simple. 

But also botulism, amirite??  Plus, people may point out (and I’m looking at you here, “Stephen”) that you can go buy canned goods for very small monies if you are dying for mushy carrots.  OR, you can just go buy carrots, sans mush.  You know this, I know this, and you know I know this.  If you have been paying any attention at all Reader, you know that this is irrelevant. 

(I mean I could make an argument here for how many black eyed peas I’m pulling in from the garden that need to be stored but like….that’s def not what I canned.)

So I go to my trusty “what if I wake up and there was some sort of improbable-to-the-point-of-impossible cosmic event where 95% of people disappear and the power grid is offline and the phones are down and somehow I’m still here trying to rebuild civilization from scratch” bookshelf, and start pulling out books about food in jars. 

Also on this book shelf: books about navigating on the open seas with no compass even though I don’t live near the ocean! Books about raising livestock in your backyard even though we're definitely not zoned for that!  Books about living alone in the woods with nothing but a pocket knife even though I have a cell phone and Verizon actually can hear me now!  I am not a prepper, Reader.  But I am a goblin, and it turns out I end up on a lot of prepper-adjacent websites.

I digress.

Compasses are for cheaters.

Full disclosure, I haven’t read through many of these food-in-jars books in anything you might consider detail.  (Although I read through all of the "find your way through the woods without a map" book and now I know why they say moss grows on the north side of trees and how to find south-ish if the moon is out and yet can still get lost in my closet and it is NOT A BIG CLOSET.)  I have skimmed the canning books, then when I realized it was mostly recipes for things to put in cans and not some history of canning as a science and an art I sorta stopped skimming.  I can Google recipes.  I’d rather read to understand canning more, but it turns out those are not the books I bought and then I already spent my weird-survivalist-book-budget money on the books I have.  Plus I have the internet.

This flippant attitude has meant that I absolutely did miss some interesting factoids about canning as a science and an art that I figured out over the last few days when casting a more diligent eye over these books.  For example, you can add lemon seeds in a little spell packet made out of cheesecloth to whatever you’re trying to jelly and it’ll add pectin, which turns jelly from diabetes syrup into spreadable diabetes goop.  

If you were to find this intriguing you might ask other relevant questions such as "how many seeds?" or "how long do they need to be in there?" and you will not find those answers but you will learn that jelly and jam might take up to two weeks to set into a recognizable-as-jelly form, so you have no short term way of experimenting to see if you did it right.

This two-week fact in particular strikes me as strange, because what….is pectin?  (Great question, Reader!  But not the kind of question these books answer.)  What is it that it might take up to two weeks to work?  Is it….alive, like a yeast, so might need time to get up and running based on other things that are or are not present in the mix?  Is it having some sort of chemical reaction that might, for unknowable (j/k it’s totally knowable, they just don't tell you, but hey, we have the internet) reasons go super slow sometimes, but fast other times?  

Just for funsies as I made my little seed sachet, (Reader, we even own pectin.  I already have pectin.  Pectin would not have required an errand.  But like...I just wanna make pectin anyway.)  I casually glanced over the troubleshooting section of reasons your jelly might not set and it goes like this:

Got it?  Got it!

     - Too much sugar

     - Not enough sugar

     - Too much pectin

     - Not enough pectin

     - Over cooked

     - Under cooked

     - Look, stop reading this list and go back and try again—it could have been anything, you just did something wrong.

     - Or it might be fine!  Give it two weeks!

Water bath canning involves submerging your jars of food
in boiling water for a period of time, heating them and pushing
air out of the lids to ensure everything is cooked and sealed.

This is distinct from pressure canning, which requires buying
special equipment and is used for meats because it
achieves a temperature above boiling.

I also looked up botulism, and got some interesting perspective there.  As a modern home canner, this is the elephant in the room—the huge, terrifying, very deadly, rampaging elephant that wants to stomp you out like a fire in the Serengeti.  If you, Reader, do not have a healthy respect for this bloodthirsty fiend, just casually find a Facebook group about canning and mention adding flour as a thickening agent or water bathing meat and wait for the carnage.  Mention that you carefully washed your mason jars in soap and hot water but did not actually boil them before use.  The canning police are out there, and they are vigilant with a righteous vigilance because they are trying to save your life.  Botulism is an ELEPHANT but not like a cool smart matriarch grandma elephant or like an adorable playful baby elephant but more like an evil soul-eating litch elephant, and she WANTS TO KILL YOU.  

However.  Botulism is also very rare.  It is caused by a bacteria found usually in the soil that can’t live in acidic environments.  So like…just wash everything good in soap and hot water and then add some lemon juice so that even if it did somehow sneak past your defenses and invade your home canning set-up, it’ll die before it can kill you. 

I know that sounds casual but not because I don't fear botulism.  I do.  It sounds casual because science.  There are charts about how acidic or alkali whatever you are canning is, and then how much lemon juice or vinegar to add.  Throw in some extra if you’re nervous—canning is simple, and our grandmother’s grandmothers did it, in feast and famine, on the run and high on the hog.  It is perfectly doable to do safely in your home, and our home is much cleaner than my great-grandmothers'.   Also you can just put the mason jars in the oven for 30 min at 250 and it’ll kill all the bad germs and you don’t have to wait for water to boil.   I’m saying, this whole process isn’t as intimidating as it gets credit for.

Pressure cooking is recommended for meat, but you can water bath it, you just have to do it forrrrrreeeeeverrrrr (like as long as you think that means, and add 2 hrs) and it’s going to make your house all hot so just…be ready for that.  Maybe more of a winter activity.

Are you grossed out by the idea of canning meat?  So am I!  Well, I was, til I stopped thinking about just…chunks of meat, and instead about "Andy's" chili and homemade beef stew and chicken noodle soup that I def have cans of in the pantry already but these would be hommmeeeemmmaaaaaaade.  "Stephen" I can hear you rolling your eyes from here.  Now look, if

Probably saving your LIFE, "Andy."
THAT's what I'm doing.

you home make beef stew or chicken noodle soup, you can just freeze those and not have to either buy a pressure canner or spend hours in the same house as a giant boiling water pot, but when the improbable-to-the-point-of-impossible cosmic event happens, or more realistically in my house, your freezer is already full of brown bananas you may or may not one day turn into banana bread and chicken skins cuz you wanna render fat for fun and vegetable broth cuz you had saved so many onion and carrot and parsley scraps but have no plans to make soup in the foreseeable future, OR for any coastal Readers out there, when Dorain is coming and the power may well go out for a while but you made it to the grocery store after everyone cleared out the canned soups and stews and besides you really need the comfort of "Andy's" chili recipe to help you weather the storm, then canning might be a good option for you.

All of this is to say, I did some canning this weekend.  I didn’t venture into the kitchen-steaming world of stew or chicken noodle soup, but I did make a jelly and a jam.  They both have plenty of lemon juice.  The second time went smoother than the first, logistically, and I really need to invest in a wide mouth sieve because the dog ate ours and ladling liquid molten sugar goop into mason jars is...not ideal.  The day started with me telling “Andy” to stay upstairs for six hours because the kitchen was going to be a Situation.  But man, everything smelled good.  I made my own pectin because of course I did, and they’re definitely all still runny because of course they are.  Call me in two weeks and I’ll tell you if it set.