Shooting the breeze

By Tori Lyle

news@campcountynow.com

My dad and I made a deal when my family and I moved in with him – we would have a garden and split the work. He would plant and do all the legwork. I would preserve, dehydrate and freeze all that was harvested.

After three straight months of unseasonal Texas rain followed by ample sunshine – I got the short end of that stick. We planted cucumbers, squash, peppers, peas, tomatillos and tomatoes. Oh the tomatoes. So. Many. Tomatoes.

I thought for a while that they were never going to turn red. Last year's harvest never did. I ended up eating a lot of fried green tomatoes last summer. This year, I went ahead and picked a bushel of green tomatoes and made two batches of salsa verde. I would have been happy as a clam if that's all our two little rows of tomato plants had produced. Twas not to be.

Last week alone, I put up 13 pints of zesty – translation: hotter than Hades – salsa and two dehydrator rounds full of dehydrated tomatoes. And cucumbers? Almost as bad. I taught my little ones to can pickles this year and between the three of us, we managed to rack up nearly 20 pints. Got enough tomatillos off my two little plants for a fantastic pint of roasted tomatillo salsa.

There's peas in the freezer, squash in our bellies and jalapenos in everything we've cooked. Now that we're near the end of our summer season, I'm wore out and ready to plow, but I'm also a little sad. I love the entire process of turning fresh produce into something my family can enjoy throughout the winter and spring. I love that it's fresh, I know where it came from and I know what went into every step. Whether I'm cutting my 30th tomato into small slices or shelling the gazillionth pea of the season, I can't help but feel closer to my grandparents.

My granddaddy always had a huge garden busting with every vegetable imaginable. He fed not only his family every year, but a slew of neighbors who would come calling with their own produce to trade. I hope that by this small measure of washing a Ball jar and filling it with the fruits of my labor, I'm honoring their legacy and instilling this love of family and cooking into my own children.

I hope that in 20 years, my grandchildren are underfoot as I can that year's harvest and they tell their children about shelling peas at their grandmother's knee. I would rather they honor these simple tasks over any amount of formal education in the world. These skills are not only fun, they are survival skills. They teach math, chemistry, history, cooking.

The best thing about the canning process is how potentially dangerous it can be. It isn't like regular cooking. One wrong step and you create botulism. Scary, right? But it forces you to slow down, remember each step carefully and above all, follow directions. What better life skills can we hope to teach our children?

I encourage everyone to learn to can. It's cheap, easy to learn and easy to get started. I recommend the Ball Blue Book guide of preserving – it's basically the canning Bible. I bought a much larger Ball preserving cookbook, but the small Blue Book has all the favorites – all the basics of canning – and it's cheaper. Win win.

Don't let anyone tell you that you have to buy new jars. Pish posh. I've canned in 80-year-old Atlas jars just as well as brand new Ball jars. As long as they are actual canning jars, you're good to go. An easy way to check is try fitting it with a two-piece lid. If it fits, and there's a label of some kind on the jar – Atlas, Ball, Mason, Golden Harvest – it's probably a canning jar. Make sure it doesn't have a handle. Those are drinking jars.

The one thing that HAS to be new is the lid – the flat part of the two-piece lids. That's because the seal is the most important part of the canning process. The ring part of the two-piece lid can be reused until it rusts. Garage sales and thrift shops are a great place to find jars, but they're also sold new by the case at most grocery stores and big-box chain stores.

There's also a lot of handy-dandy tools that people insist you need, but I'll let you in on a little secret. That lid lifter? It's a magnet on a stick. The bubble releaser? It's a plastic knife. The headspace tool is neat, but I can never get it exact anyway. And a funnel is a funnel is a funnel. Just make sure the hole is big enough for whatever you're wanting to go through it.

The one thing I have found is that a real-deal water bath canner with a lift-out rack is pretty essential, ditto on the jar lifter. I have successfully canned in a regular tall cooking pot, but my nerves were shot by the end because I could hear the jars knocking against each other and the side of the pot while they were boiling. And I hate waiting to remove the jars, so a jar lifter is a nice tool to have.

I encourage everyone to grab some tools, grab some fruits and veggies, grab some friends and family and get in the kitchen. Send me photos of what you've canned, I'd love to see them. For details and to learn the rules you have to follow, either use the Ball Blue Book or visit the Ball website at www.freshpreserving.com.