by Teresa
Food preservation seems like a gentle activity, but I’m here with bruises and scrapes in odd places, aches and pains, a jammed wrist and a sore butt to tell you about the hidden dangers of canning–and I don’t mean botulism or exploding pressure canners. I mean those things the Ball Book of Potential Food Disasters…I mean Food Preservation…doesn’t warn you about.
Does anyone else think that particular recipe book is sometimes enough to put you off canning forever? All the dire warnings! But they never talk about When Food Fights Back.
Saturday, we picked up a bushel of Cortland apples. We all have our favorite apples but I grew up in the Finger Lakes of New York–apple central–in the very town of Cortland. Honestly I don’t know if the apple varietywas named for our little town, but we’d claimed it as our apple. But I digress. The point is we had a bushel of apples. We made some apple butter and some apple sauce, and then the Cat-Herder said, “Can you make pie filling in advance and can it?” You never know when you might have a pie emergency, so I checked out. The Ball Book had a recipe for frozen filling, but our freezer’s mighty crowded, so I looked on the internet and found Apple Pie in a Jar. Bingo!
We set to work with our canning rig and our apple peeler/corer/slicer (ours is red and we bought it at our local non-chain hardware store, where the guys are used to us coming in and asking unique questions such as what size screws would be best for attaching rapier blades, but it’s the same model) and soon had a huge pot of caramelly, cinnamon-infused syrup and a big old bowl of sliced apples. I commenced to pack the jars with apples. My darling Cat-Herder poured in the syrup and sealed the jars.
And here the problem began, because I forget he’s new to canning. He’d assisted in a few applesauce operations, but only by fetching me hot jars. He didn’t know about headspace. *cue the ominous music*
For those of you who don’t can, each jar has to have a certain amount of space at the top, but I didn’t impress on the poor man how much that mattered–and he had ten cups of cinnamon-flavored caramel syrup. What guy with a sweet tooth wouldn’t want to cram all the gloopy goodness he could into each jar? To add to the problem I’d been a little overly liberal with the apples, stuffing a few more into the jar than I really ought to.
Put the overfilled jars into boiling water and what do you get? You get jars that continue to burble syrup onto the kitchen table (luckily onto a towel) long after they’re out of the canner and naturally don’t seal. Only two of the jars were that bad, although all of them came out of the canner a bit sticky as a result of the two where the food decided to attempt to get away.
I intended to re-can them in the morning, but I overslept and couldn’t face getting all the canning stuff out and heated up for two jars. So I hauled out a freezer container and glooped the glop into it.
Annoying canning misadventure, you may be thinking, but where does the extreme sport come in? Wait for it…
Our standing freezer’s in the basement, so down I went with the two-quart container of pie filling, a steak we’d stowed in the upstairs freezer but needed to end up in the colder standing freezer, and two pints of apple butter. Yeah, lazy man’s load, but I hadn’t had coffee yet. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Our laundry room’s also in the basement. In my morning haze, I’d forgotten that after we finished canning, we disposed of the dirty dishtowels and dishclothes by tossing them downstairs, figuring we’d get them the rest of the way to the washer in the morning. Wet towels aren’t terribly aerodynamic, though, so they festooned the steps. And there were a lot of towels! Canning is messy by nature and when you have caramel involved, it’s extra-messy.
So I’m picking my way among the laundry with my arms full of freezer containers–and did I mention I’m wearing my fuzzy slippers, which I’m now planning to replace because it seems the soles are now so slick as to be deadly, at least pre-coffee?
About halfway down the stairs, I stepped on a towel and slipped. The rest of the way down was traversed on my butt. En route, the seal failed on the tub of pie filling. It didn’t upend, thanks to the same cosmic power that allows cats to land on their feet and small children to generally bounce, but it did splatter sugary goo everywhere.
It could have been far worse. I’m sore, but more or less undamaged–and in the end, the pie filling survived. (And the apple butter was frozen solid, thank gods. Talk about a sticky mess!) But the last time I was this banged up and sore, I was learning to fence. Actually, this is worse than fencing. You wear padding for fencing!
So be warned: food preservation can be dangerous. Sometimes the food fights back.
By the way, the pie in a jar is really tasty–after all that effort it had better be. I suggest you taste the syrup as you’re making it. I ended up trebling the spices because it seemed bland for my taste, but with some extra cinnamon and nutmeg, it’s delightful.
If you try it, though, remember you may need someone else on hand to help you subdue this clearly feisty foodstuff. I’m sure if my husband hadn’t been at work, he could have gotten it to go quietly to the freezer without an escape attempt. Then again, he is an animal control officer. If he can wrestle Rottweilers, apples and sugar wouldn’t stand a chance.
gingerbread house along with Christmas cookies. I found this recipe for gingerbread on the bon appetit site and it cooked up nicely, even in the wood cook stove! They walk you through the whole house making process. This dough, though, makes the perfect gingerbread men. I had a mini cutter so my guys are short stuff – has no effect on the tastey factor.
I made the dough earlier in the day and let it sit in the frig until later in the afternoon. Then the rolling and cooking began. Use the link if you want to see the whole process. Looks like a lot of work – not really. I knitted/crochet while cookies were in the oven. Gave me a chance to work on some gifts AND enjoy the heat from the wood stove.
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