My First Canning Adventure

Last weekend, I took up the age-old tradition of canning and curing. I found a book recently published called Homemade Living: Canning and Preserving on the Design Sponge site I now frequent and thought why not?

So I set off for Leesburg for a farmers market that I knew carried a lot of organic produce and hoped for slightly cheaper prices than the city. I was in luck! Prices were noticeably cheaper, which is important because when you are buying 8 pounds of peaches and tomatoes, it adds up! Based on what was available I decided I'd make blues and bay, tomato basil sauce, peach lavender butter, and cherry lemon thyme marmalade.

As for curing, I found a recipe in The River Family Cottage Cookbook for curing your own bacon and it was actually easy! Basically rubbing a cure mix on pork belly for four days and then eating and enjoying! I had a little sample last night and besides it being a tad salty, it was so good! You can cut it really thick and it is luxuriously decadent.

Here's what I learned:

Unitaskers are your friend in canning: Earlier in the week I bought some supplies to can including a canning rack, funnel, lid lifter and jar scraper. Little did I know, I forgot one other key supply--a jar lifter! Seemingly superfluous, it actually services a very important anti-boiling water burning skin function.

Canning is more relaxing than cooking: It is a step by step process that by nature takes time, so you're not furiously chopping to get ingredients in after the onions have caramelized or trying to cook an entree and two sides so everything comes out hot.

I hope to get a pressure canner soon so I can try canning low-acid foods (clementine cointreau curd), but I think I'll have to sell Chris on the first set of canned products before we add anything else to our kitchen.

I haven't opened any up yet, but while we are on vacation next week I am sure we'll be trying the goods. I have more photos on our flickr site too!