"[T]he symptoms are basically gone"

A cautionary tale about D.I.Y. tonic water in an age where we can find small-batch "artisanal" tonics and non-alcoholic homebrews at the farmers market:

I'm not saying that you need to be a food scientist or a compounding pharmacist to do things safely, but you have to understand that you're working with potentially harmful substances! Indian Calamus root, Virginia Snakeroot or tobacco - even in small amounts can have horrible and irreversible effects. Just last week, I was told about a bar that was soaking stone fruit pits in neutral grain and had no idea about cyanide toxicity.

Careful out there, folks!

Speaking of potent home-made potables, we did make a batch of Rowhouse Livin' gin this year, only we added blueberries. Brhubarb! The result is a deeper pink rather than the dusty rose that rhubarb-only usually produces. And now I feel compelled to warn people to never, ever use rhubarb leaves for anything but compost or mulch. Don't eat them. Don't feed them to your livestock or pets. They are poisonous.

You probably won't die because you probably can't physically ingest a deadly quantity of rhubarb leaves at one sitting. But even a small portion of leaves, cooked or uncooked, will make you sick enough for hospitalization.

More on canning butternut squash: choosing from two different recommendations

Yesterday I made myself super happy by putting up 7 quarts of butternut squash. I followed the USDA's method, while cross-referencing with the instructions given in the Bernardin Complete Book of Home Preserving. And I noticed a minor difference between the two, a difference that is hopefully not as wildly shocking and controversial as the sudden, inexplicable, unbelievable announcement from Ball that you don't actually need to heat up your canning lids before applying them to your jars.

To can winter squash, you peel the vegetable, scoop out the seeds, and chop the flesh into 1-inch chunks. You drop the chunks into a stockpot, cover them with water, bring the pot to a boil, and gently cook the chunks for a couple of minutes. Then you use a slotted spoon to fill your jars and finally top off the jars with liquid, leaving 1 inch headspace.

But what liquid?! There's where USDA and Bernardin differ. USDA (2009) says to simply use the liquid that the squash cooked in. But Bernardin (2012) says to use fresh boiling water! What to do?

If you use the cooking liquid, then you'll be retaining more nutrients, particularly beta-carotene, in your jar. Now, it's not that the pre-pack cooking leaches all the beta-carotene out of the squash, since it does keep its bright orange color and the liquid is only very pale orange. But why not seek to maximize your nutrition here?

Is it a matter of hard water? If the cooking liquid started as hard water, will that give an off-taste after canning and long-term storage, which you would avoid by using fresh hard water instead? That doesn't seem to make sense. Am I missing something else instead? I don't think I am, and I don't think the issue is hard water.

So maybe it's a matter of lowering the density of the liquid in the jar, thereby reducing the risk that heat may not penetrate to the center of the product. The question could be whether the particles of squash suspended in the cooking liquid dangerously increase the packing liquid's density. But if that is the rationale, I don't agree that there's truly a risk here. The squash cubes themselves will be more dense than any liquid surrounding them. Although the jars do end up with with some shredded bits of squash in them, it's nowhere near the amount and density of particles that you'd have in jars packed with purée, which you cannot home-can because of the heat penetration problem.

In the end, I'll have to respectfully disagree with the Bernardin instructions there. I suspect that their concern is the density of the packing liquid. But I can reduce that risk by being careful not to overcook the chunks of squash before I pack them (so that they don't deteriorate into purée in the jar). And I like to try to keep as much nutrition in the jars as possible. Throwing out the cooking liquid -- that is, unless I use it as a soup base outside of the canning project -- would really be a waste.

Are the shredded squash particles in the jar on the left what Bernardin is concerned about? I think that it makes for an unattractive jar, but that there isn't enough of it to dangerously increase the density of the packing liquid here.

And P.S.: Thanks, Mom, for the birthday present of the Bernardin book!

Happy butternut squash labor day!

I spent Labor Day working for the winter, putting up some butternut squash. I loved, loved, loved having jars of squash on the shelf in 2012-13, so I'm very pleased to have pulled 7 quarts out of the pressure canner early this afternoon. They're cooling on the counter now, and I think I've already heard a few of the lids pop down with their seals.

Speaking of lids, Ball appears to have changed their instructions regarding preparing lids for use. I've followed some bouncing links around the home canning blogs, and some bloggers are freaking out that the website says one thing, while the packaging on this year's deliveries of lids says another. The "new" instructions are to "[l]eave lids and bands at room temperature for easy handling," but the instructions we've been using for decades taught us to heat the lids in water, but don't boil 'em, to soften the sealing gasket compound. Ball's put a little explanation for the change at the bottom of their general instructions for water bath canning, along with a note that, yeah, dudes, chill: it'll take a while for all the old packaging to circulate off store shelves and the new packaging to appear.

Not having yet heard of this wild controversy before I geared up this morning, I heated the lids as usual for today's batch. I've seen some anecdotal reports of increased rates of seal failures when the compound isn't pre-heated. I'm not convinced that I should use the lids I have on hand, which I bought in 2013, without pre-heating them. My jury will be out until I get a pack of lids with the new instructions, I think.

More important, though, than the ridiculous brouhaha over the lid instructions is that my vegetable peeler gave up the ghost early in today's project. Since I didn't want to go shopping on Labor Day, I ended up peeling the squash with my chef's knife. A little clunky, and my knife-wielding hand will be protesting tomorrow, I'm afraid, but the results look pretty darn good.

And cheap, too! Though we splurged on organic, local squash so it was a little more spendy than I usually like, each quart jar will work out to about $3.75 (including lid and energy). Tossing the contents into the crockpot or a saucepan and then adding stuff to make it a soup -- bouillon, pasta, rice, sautéed onion, etc. -- means a $5.00 dinner for myself and the resident teenager. My favorite kind!

Halfway through our home-canned vegetables, and not dead of botulism yet

As winter trundles along, the household has worked about halfway through the jars of green beans and carrots and soup mix that I home-canned in 2013. I've found it super-easy to cook up some pasta in broth, dump a jar of vegetables into the pot, and have soup on the table in under 15 minutes. Or I'll start some beans in the slow cooker in the morning, drop in a quart of vegetables and some seasonings when we get home from work and school, and have soup once it's all warmed through.

It has become clear to me that my pressure canning efforts in 2013 left my menu planning options skewed toward the soup end of the spectrum. I could be disappointed at the lack of variety, I guess. But the soup has been awesome when we come inside from the lousy, snowy winter days we've been having this year.

With half the jars gone off the shelf, two things come to mind. One, I am loving the result of the corn kernels in the soup mix quarts. I'm reminded of how much I loved canned corn when I was a kid, growing up on the standard American dinner of meat, two veggies, and a starch on my plate. I'm going to keep an eye out for a deal on sweet corn this summer and I hope to do at least one good canner load of pints.

Two, I wish I'd done winter squash again! It was a real treat to have those six quarts on my shelves all last winter. And it would have been nice to have another option on the vegetable shelf: in the end, there's really not much difference between a pint of green beans and a pint of soup mix.

But my point, and I had one when I started this post, was to talk about botulism. The risk of killing everyone at your table with botulism is the terrible bogeyman of home canning vegetables and other low-acid foods. When you open your jars, you can't smell it! You can't see it! But if it's there, it'll paralyze and kill you all! Scary!

What's the actual risk, though? I mean, if you keep a reasonably clean kitchen, start with excellent-quality foods, use laboratory-tested recipes, and follow your canner manufacturer's instructions? As it turns out . . .  the risk is pretty darn low.

And it's been steadily low and dropping in the past decade, at least in the U.S. For example, in 2011, the CDC collected 140 cases of botulism poisoning nationally (PDF). Of those 140, only 20 were cases involving food. Of those 20, 8 were cases involving "pruno," or prison-made home-brew alcohol. Of the 12 cases left over, only two involved home-canned food.

In 2011, there were more cases of botulism resulting from injecting drugs than from consuming home-canned food.

Nowadays, some 20% of American households put home-canned foods on their pantry shelves, and 65% of these dedicated food preservers home-can vegetables. I'm sure these numbers range from off-the-grid homesteaders to tiny-batch hobbyists; but whatever their level of commitment to putting food by, if there are 115,226,802 households in the U.S., and a fifth of them home-can foods, and 65% of that fifth home-can vegetables, and we average 2.61 people per household, then over 39 million Americans are consuming home-canned vegetables every year. Of those 39 million, two suffered botulism poisoning in 2011; neither case was fatal.

So your risk of botulism poisoning from home-canned food is about two in 39 million -- very close to just one in 20 million. By contrast, there were nearly 50,000 reported cases of Salmonella in 2009 (PDF), and 621 cases of Listeria in 2011 (PDF).

There have been outbreaks, and the risk is real. But botulism is very rare and it doesn't just happen out of nowhere. When it happens in home-canned foods, it's because of a lack of care and education. In the outbreaks reported at that NIH link there, "home canners did not follow canning instructions, did not use pressure cookers, ignored signs of food spoilage, and were unaware of the risk of botulism from consuming improperly preserved vegetables." Arguably, Salmonella and Listeria are harder to avoid than botulism, since they could come to your table in, say, prepared food from a deli, or even fresh fruit from the supermarket.

The take-away here at Rowhouse Livin'? Stay healthy (or, in our case, appreciate and cultivate the general good health that we're blessed to have). Eat well. Exercise some. Keep a clean kitchen. And keep on home-canning vegetables.

Canning jar breakage: the checklist

Last week, Marisa at Food in Jars referenced an older post of hers discussing the sad, sad situation of a home canning jar breaking in the canner. I thought I'd add my two cents!

I've been home canning for over 15 years. I think that's a while, though of course my great-grandmother, whose cellar looked like that Library of Congress photo on Wikipedia that I use as a background image on my computer sometimes, would call me a mere novice. But whatever my great-grandmother would call my skill level, in those 15-plus years I've lost only a single jar in my home canners.

There are four things that can cause a canning jar to break: thermal shock, impact shock, internal overpressure, or a manufacturing flaw. The last is very rare! Anecdotally, I hear complaints that jars aren't made as well as they used to be. But I think the real problems are unintentional mis-use related to the first three problems. Keep reading!

The summer of not canning

I have not been canning much this summer at all. I'm a little disappointed, but I think there were some important reasons why my shelves aren't groaning they way they usually are by the end of September.

A few factors:

The clean-out of the estate of my close friend's elderly aunt, who passed away in July. We've been back and forth to South Jersey most of the every-other-Saturdays when I don't have custody of my daughter. So essentially, half of my Saturdays have been claimed with this ongoing task.

The other Saturdays, when my daughter is with me, I like to have her spend time with her grandparents, at their home in the outer Philadelphia suburbs. So on most Saturdays this summer, either I've been hanging out in South Jersey, or I've been at my parents' house -- and my canning projects aren't exactly transportable.

I thought I would be canning up a storm with our CSA fruit share. But it turns out that our fruit share never measures up to a full canner load of fruit. Don't get me wrong: it's not skimpy, and we aren't being cheated. We get plenty of fruit for the week, and the peaches this year were glorious. But the fruit individually comes in small quantities: six pears plus a half-pint of kiwiberries one week, and five nectarines plus a watermelon the next. This is not cannable. This is lunchbox or picnic material, but it's not canner material, not on its own.

So four take-aways. One, we're looking into doing a double fruit share next summer. It'll still be very small-batch canning, which I think is more hobbyist than money-saving, but will still scratch my itch for putting jam on my shelves. Two, this is going to be a strange winter. I didn't do rhubarb, strawberry, or blueberry jam (not counting the syrupy mis-step at the end of June) -- I always get at least one of those, my holy trinity, in by the end of July. I didn't do my Rowhouse Livin' gin, either (though I did make a rhubarb pie for myself for Mother's Day). I have maybe a half-dozen jars of jam left over from 2012, but that stock is being rapidly depleted. Late winter and early spring, 2014, are looking bleak!

Three, seriously, this estate work is taking up a ridiculous amount of time, and I'm not even one of the executors. The elderly aunt was so very generous in her financial planning, but her tangible assets were left in multiple locations and her financial assets were left in numerous accounts across several institutions. One of the greatest gifts we can give our heirs is to leave our affairs organized for them. There are so many vehicles and instruments available. The time you spend with a lawyer now will be a gift of time to your heirs after you're gone.

And four, apple butter season approaches, and the daughter reminded me just the other day that we haven't gone apple picking for a few years now. I think I'm counting down the days until my next custody Saturday. Maybe early 2014 won't be too bleak, after all.

Canning: Apple-blueberry . . . syrup

Canning season has started not with a bang but a whimper.

I tried to make an apple-blueberry jam with some CSA fruit, but I wasn't careful with the combination of sugar, acid, and pectin, so it didn't set properly. Now I have 7 half-pints of apple-blueberry syrup instead. And 2 of the jars didn't even seal!

Don't get me wrong: these 7 half-pints will cover a lot of pancakes. But since it was unintentional, and since it was the first project of the season, I'm disappointed.

So disappointed, I can bring myself to post a photo
of only 3 half-pints. Sob

Applying CRITIC to a home canning blogger

Your tax dollars at work, and I don't mean that sarcastically at all: I've found an excellent slideshow webinar from just last year (2011) about home canning. The speaker, Elizabeth Andress, Ph.D., of the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension spends a nice amount of time discussing how improperly canned food promotes the production of the botulinum toxin by C. botulinum, and then she moves on to nuts and bolts. Useful introduction for anyone who's never canned before, and a nice review for old-timers like me.

She wraps up the webinar by suggesting that home canners pick up a few publications from the USDA and read very carefully the booklets that come with their canning supplies. Here's where CRITIC can come into play. I still have a bee in my bonnet about putting up some winter squash before the end of the month. I'd love to purée it so that I can fit more squash in each jar and thus use my pantry space efficiently. But word from the USDA and my canning supply booklets says that's a big no-no, and I should can the winter squash in cubes instead. On the other hand, look at this lovely blog entry about canning squash -- against all bold-faced warnings based on laboratory testing, the blog author purées the squash. Then, contrary to specific instructions accompanying tested methods, the author leaves only a half-inch of headspace. But the jars look fine, and the author has evidently not perished, because they have continued to blog since posting their photos. And they sure do look like they know what they're doing.

The problem is that repeated laboratory testing -- laboratories, where they have instruments to digitally measure pH, temperature, air pressure, density, and so on, unlike what I can see in the blog author's kitchen -- has found no way to formulate a consistently safe recipe for home canning a winter squash purée, even if you add lemon juice to try to increase its acidity. This is because the chemical composition and texture of winter squash vary too much from item to item and in preparation of the food. By the time you've cooked the squash and mashed it, one batch will be watery and another, well, not so watery; and without commercial canning equipment you can't tell whether you need 60 minutes at 240 degrees F or 120 minutes. It makes for way too much variation to boil down, so to speak, for home canning instruction. (Do you have an evaporator at home?) In other words, the USDA would argue, you can't magically make pumpkin an acid food, that is, a substance that can't promote growth of C. botulinum bacteria, by adding lemon juice and sugar and cooking it into pumpkin butter. Apple butter is fine, because it starts with fruit, an acid food. But pumpkin butter starts with pumpkin, a low-acid vegetable. You can't get around that.

Happily, the word has generally gotten out that home canners should preserve winter squash in chunks, not puréed. The chunks are easily mashed before use, anyway.

Whom to believe? The home canner with their photos and nice blog, or the USDA? Call me a "sheeple" but I'll go with the USDA. Two prongs of the CRITIC test fall in the USDA's favor: the first I and the second C.

The claim: USDA says that home pressure canning winter squash must be done in cubes, never in purée. Home canning blogger offers method for preserving purée for purportedly safe household use.

I - What is the information supporting the claim? The USDA labs are constantly trying recommended home canning recipes, adjusting instructions, and even sometimes withdrawing suggested methods when new data emerges. The home canning blogger has their blog and some photos. There is no follow-up blog entry (that I saw immediately) as to whether the purée canned successfully. But the USDA releases new editions of its canning guidelines frequently.

C - What cause is proposed for the claim? The USDA gives detailed reasons in its page advising against canning winter squash purée, e.g., that they tested commercially produced and home-canned pumpkin butters that had pH levels too high to inhibit growth of C. botulinum bacteria. The home canning blogger gives . . . nothing. There is a processing time given, but no reference to an authority, not even Grandma, for this amount of time, which is 10 minutes less than the USDA's scientifically tested time. The blogger doesn't address this discrepancy, and they don't address why they, in opposition to canning guides published by university extension offices around the country, believe that canning purée rather than cubes is safe. In short, the USDA explains its cause, but the home canning blogger offers no cause at all.

CRITIC says that I should listen to the USDA, not an Internet blogger, even though their photos make their step-by-step instructions mostly helpful. Except for that half-inch headspace thing. It should be a full one inch.

The CRITIC method for evaluating the Internet

The other day I came across a profile of Wayne Bartz, a professor of psychology who has offered the acronym CRITIC for undergraduates to use as a method to evaluate stuff they read. In brief:

C Claim? (What is the claim?)
R Role of the claimant? (Who is the claimant? Where are they from, and cui bono?)
I Information supporting the claim? (Does the claimant offer anecdotal evidence, or results of a peer-reviewed inquiry following the scientific method of evaluating empirical findings, or something in between?)
T Testable? (Can the claim be tested?)
I Independently repeated? (Has anyone else re-tested the claims and repeated the claimant's results?)
C Cause proposed? (What kind of mechanism does the claimant offer that causes the claim to occur -- is it something reasonable, or is it something that flies in the face of current scientific understanding?)

The full article (PDF) discusses the CRITIC steps from the perspective of teaching it to first-year college students. I think it's useful for evaluating blogs, informational websites, and YouTube videos offering information that an urban home economist may use. For Rowhouse Livin', purposes, we've been all about food preservation lately, as the farmers market season wraps up. For example, for my next trick I'll be pressure-canning some winter squash some forthcoming weekend. I figure it'll be nice to have on hand some quart portions of pre-cooked chunks of squash for quick soups and side dishes as the school year progresses. Some school nights we don't roll in until after 7:00 p.m., and if I don't have dinner on the table within about a half hour of coming home, I feel like a bad mom. Or very hungry, anyway. So we've been looking up and trying to evaluate canning recipes and methods. But what to do when a recipe says, "I've been water-bath canning my pumpkin puree for 50 years and haven't killed anyone yet," or a video shows someone inverting jars after taking them out of the canner? Run the suggestions through CRITIC.

I still have a few questions about canning winter squash. It's supposed to be a good source of Vitamin A, but how well does Vitamin A hold up to canning? I've wasted time, money, and jar lids if the squash loses all its nutritional value in processing. (Approximate answer is "go ahead and can it," from a source that home economists should bookmark)? I've found a helpful home video, but after he removes the canner lid, shouldn't the dude in the video let the jars sit in the pressure canner and cool a little bit more before removing them (not necessarily, but I do)?

I think I have a good handle on what I need to know for the project, but I'll poke around a few more resources before I get started. What kind of critical thinking checklist do you go through when you look on the Internet for answers to a question?

Home canning so far this year

Light blogging today while I get some other work done, so a quick summary of my home canning so far this year:

• 4 half-pints of strawberry jam
• 2 pints of rhubarb jam
• 5 half-pints of strawberry-rhubarb jam
• 1 3/4 quarts of "Rowhouse Livin' Gin" (a rhubarb-infused vodka)
• 4 pints of onion pickle
• 6 half-pints of blueberry jam
• 2 quarts of brandied blueberries
• 4 quarts of tomatoes
• 4 pints of marmalade and 1 pint of marmalade syrup
• 2 quarts of vegetable stock

About the only thing left to do this year is some apple butter. I usually make two batches, but we'll see what my weekends look like for the rest of the month. Also I'd like to put up some more vegetable broth, because it was a straightforward project.

Have you put anything up this year? Any plans for the rest of the season?

Home canning: Onion pickle

I found a few huge, beautiful, sweet white onions at the farmers market in July, along with some sharp red "torpedo" onions. I took 6 white onions and 2 red onions and essentially used the Ball Blue Book recipe for vinegared red onions, but modified along the lines of what Food in Jars came up with a little while ago. I left out sugar for a sour-only pickle, dropping cloves, peppercorns, mustard seed, and celery seed into the jars before packing in the heated, sliced onions, and I ended up with these beauties:

All, and I mean all, the sample recipes I found called for sugar,
which I left out. Hope that wasn't a mistake

They've been ageing for a few weeks now. When they first hopped out of the canner, the red torpedoes had stained the jars bright, bright pink. Now they've mellowed to a crazy brown-mustard parchment color, and you can't tell the torpedoes from the sweet whites.

The Rowhouse Livin' household doesn't consume a lot of pickles, so I hardly ever make them, whether onions, or cucumbers, or any other type of pickle. I used to make bread-and-butter pickles, but after a few intervals of realizing it was taking me two years for us to finish a mere five pints of pickles, I decided to leave them out of my canning repertoire for a while. So I'm realistic and imagine it will take me a while to get through these onions. I see them as a topping for salads, or a winter sandwich condiment, or a relish to accompany the pizzas I make for my Sunday semi-potluck dinners. I'm really looking forward to popping the lids and seeing how they turned out.

Recipe:

If you are not familiar with home canning, please see the National Center for Home Food Preservation. This recipe does not substitute for a complete set of instructions on safe home canning practices. Jar size: pints. Slice the onions in half lengthwise, then into narrow slices crosswise. Add to a large saucepot, cover with vinegar, add 1 generous tablespoon non-iodized salt, and bring to a boil. Gently simmer onions for 10 minutes.

Into each pint jar, add a few whole cloves, a few peppercorns, 1/4 teaspoon whole mustard seed, and 1/4 teaspoon celery seed. Fill heated jars with hot onions and cooking liquid, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Process pints 10 minutes (sea level) in a boiling-water bath canner. For this batch, 8 onions yielded 6 pints.

How to label home-preserved food

I can my own food more for penny-pinching reasons than for hobby reasons, so I'm not into decorating my jars with squares of cloth and tying hand-written cards to the jars with rustic-looking twine:

Gag me with an attached spoon

And the sticker labels that you find for sale next to the canning jars never really wash off:

I do not exaggerate: both of these jars have gone through the canner
at least a dozen times since I first removed their labels. Also: camera out of focus

Ball assures me that they've made their newest labels with a less permanent, "dissolvable" adhesive. But still, why spend the money? It's not a challenge to tell a jar of pickled onions from a jar of baked beans. The only thing you really need to note on the jar is the date you produced it. While you can tell a jar of strawberry jam from a jar of orange marmalade, you can't tell a jar of apple butter from 2011 versus 2008, unless you have a fantastic memory of what each year's batch looked like, based on the variety of apple and ratio of spices you tried out. Or you want to do some forensic dating based on the style of snap lid you used:

"RAS-BLU JAM"? Also: I hated that cute little basket-'n'-banner
style of lid (top left). Luckily, masking tape.

To sum up: Yes, you need to label your jars. At the very least, you must put a date on them; month and year is perfectly adequate. The official rule is to use up home-canned food within 12 months of taking it out of the canner, because after 12 months it deteriorates in both quality and safety. (Even if you're willing to use jars that have been kicking around for longer than that, you need to be able to determine exactly how long a particular jar has been kicking around.) As for naming the jar's contents, you should do that, though it's not nearly as strictly necessary as dating the jar. While it's easy to tell whole tomatoes from cranberry sauce, will you really remember, a year from now, which jar is white-peach butter and which is pear butter? It takes only a second to scrawl RAS-BLU JAM over 06/08, and it saves guesswork in 06/09.

Or in 07/13

Canning fail: beer jelly

The Ball Blue Book has included a recipe for chablis wine jelly for a few editions now. I had never used it, for a couple of reasons. One, because soft spreads are a breakfast food for me, and even if I had leftover wine in the house (not sure exactly what the phrase means, "leftover wine"; I've never come across such an animal, myself), I think I'd rather use it in a savory dish, not in a jelly. And two, because home canning for me is more of an economic strategy than a hobby. I tend to make jams and preserves not for fun, but for saving money over supermarket prices. (Also: selfish. I don't like to give away my home-canned foods because I hate losing jars!)

But then I saw an article late last year in Philly Beer Scene magazine about a line of jellies made from craft beers and ales. I looked at some local imperial stout I had picked up cheap a few days before and stowed in the fridge. And I put two and two together and figured I'd get four half-pints of a savory jelly to serve with cheese and crackers or take to a holiday party. Unfortunately, the answer I got to two plus two was "six":

Jars this gnarly don't deserve a non-gnarly photo

Beer, unlike chablis wine, is carbonated. Heating beer in sugar-water leads to a release of the carbonation. Placing that mess in jars and then boiling them in a water-bath canner leads to even more release of the carbonation. I've taken a bad picture there for your protection, but the recipe that was supposed to yield 4 half-pints of beer jelly instead gave me 5 half-pints and 2 quarter-pints of foamy mess and a water-bath canner full of sugar-beer that made my house smell like a brewery. Lordy, I haven't had jars turn out that bad since my early canning days, when I would over-fill quart jars with applesauce and lose entire canner loads to failed seals.

The jars have been kicking around on a low, open shelf since November 2011 because I don't have the heart to offer the product to guests or the pride to take them to a party. Yes, that's a light coating of dust on the lids. I'm just surprised that the goop on the outside -- which I've tried several times to wipe off -- hasn't attracted ants.

Or maybe I'm not too surprised after all.

I know what I did wrong: I should have skimmed off the foam like mad. I should have added the beer after turning off the flame. Better yet, I should have opened up the stout the day before, decanted it in another container, and let it go flat before using. The Ball Blue Book includes a recipe for champagne jelly as well, and I should have relied more on that method than on my lousy instincts.

Haven't yet decided if I'll try again, though -- or if I'll put my next few bottles of imperial stout to their more intended use, and keep home canning for pantry purposes, not for hobby purposes.

Food dehydrator?

Researching food dehydrators lately. I already have a feeling that making my own raisins at home is probably more expensive than buying them at the lowest sale price I can find or wait for at the supermarket. But I can probably make my own dried apricots, apples, bananas, and other fruits for cheaper than what I'd find at the store, and I wouldn't sulfur them, sulfured dried fruits being something that hippies like myself try to avoid, for vague "it's a chemical, so it's probably teratogenic" reasons.

I don't keep a lot of dried foods on hand. I'm not a hiker, and it's not part of my emergency supplies. The question, then, is whether I'd actually change enough of my diet to make it worth my while to home-dehydrate a lot of produce. I mean, I guess I do go on a dried apricot kick every once in a while; and I add prunes to oatmeal. But I'm not really an oatmeal-for-breakfast person. Maybe I would dehydrate enough vegetables to make a lot of crockpot soups in the winter? Ooooh, or maybe vegetable lasagna? Or, of course, emergency supplies that would absolutely be cheaper than the ready-to-eat and instant foods I currently keep.

The deluxe-est home dehydrators go for about $250.00. I suspect it would take me a long time to make that pay for itself, though of course I don't have to get the deluxe-est. Hrm, no decision yet.

Blueberries IV: canning

First up, blueberry jam:

Six half-pints waiting for February

We are a jam-eating household. The term foodway is a little pretentious, but one of my parents grew up on a farm in Canada, and breakfast at Grandma's always included toast with a fruit spread or honey on it. I've never lost the habit. My usual weekday breakfast is a poached egg, toast with some kind of sweet spread, and coffee. I go through about half a pint of jam or fruit butter a week, so I try to put up at least a dozen pints (two dozen half-pints) myself and welcome the odd gift or farmers market find.

My recipe for jam is pretty standard: 5 cups of crushed fruit plus some lemon juice if it would add nicely to the flavor, 3 cups of granulated cane sugar, and 2 tablespoons of powdered pectin. In my 15 years of home canning experience, most fruit will jell just fine into preserves or jam with these proportions, and there is tolerance for more movement than you'd think on either side. The main trick is to ignore the Ball Blue Book or Ball brand pectin instructions that tell you to dump the pectin, alone, into the pan where the fruit and sugar are cooking: you'll get a mess of undissolved pectin lumps that way. To my absolute mystification, Ball has been telling people to do it that way for years, but you can easily avoid the lump problem by mixing the pectin and sugar together while dry.

Next up, berries for grown-ups:

Two quarts. Smaller sizes would have been wasteful.

I had never done brandied fruit before, but it had been on my mind since enjoying some brandied pears at a friend's place earlier this year. I didn't know what I'd been missing! What a lovely way to top off a dinner party.

Recipe was simple enough: Gently warm up the berries in just enough water and sugar for a hot pack in very light syrup; pack the jars with about an inch of headspace; add a quarter cup of brandy to each jar; and top off with syrup from the cooking pan. Process as ordinary hot-packed berries.

As you can see from the industrial-sized lid there, I was stuck using my pressure canner, because my boiling-water bath canner is too short to handle quart jars. (Long story.) This was a drag, not in the least because it took forever and heated up the house way too much to bring that pressure canner full of water to a boil. Next time I'll do this in pint jars, or I'll bite the bullet and get a larger boiling-water bath canner.

On to the leftovers. What to do with the last sad cup and a half of berries languishing in the fridge at the end of the week?

This was some pint-like European size, and I didn't run it through my canner,
just snapped it down and tossed it in the fridge for immediate use.

I didn't run it through the canner because, one, I didn't have enough product to properly fill the jar; and two, I don't "do" Parfait jars. I think they're great for dry storage and holding stuff like this that I intend to use right away, but I'm much handier canning American-style with snap lids and metal rings. The mileage of other home canners -- say, that of everyone in France -- of course may vary.

That said, I just spent 10 minutes poking around Le Parfait's website and just fell in love with their thermostatic-controlled automatic timer canners. Oh, lordy. Brother, can you spare a voltage converter?

This was supposed to be blueberry syrup, but it jelled accidentally. This is because I added sugar to the berries and water before letting the product reduce while I ate breakfast, by which process I inadvertently brought it all up to jelly temperature. I should have cooked down the berries in water, added some sugar, and cooked it only long enough to dissolve the sugar. A really amateur hour mistake: all the ingredients are the same, so why does it matter what order I add them to the pot? Let's just say I'm happy I put it into a jar instead of into a bottle. The upside is that it's a lovely jell, with the shininess and "sharp" edges that you don't get from forcing the jell with added pectin. Very old-fashioned.

Blueberries II: to freeze or not to freeze

Next step for the blueberries was to put a small portion in the freezer:

And by "small" I mean something like a bare pint

It's cheap supermarket plasticware, possibly Ziploc brand. I'm not too careful with my freezing technique, since I tend to do it in small quantities and use the items really soon anyway, sometimes within weeks. Here, I picked over and rinsed the berries, tossed them in the container, and chunked 'em into the back of the freezer.

I don't do a lot of freezing as part of my pantry strategy, for a few reasons. One, to begin with, I don't have a "deep freeze" (Grandma's term for "chest freezer"), mostly because I don't have room for one. Two, I'd hate to have carefully bought, prepared, and packaged 15 cubic feet of food only to lose it in a single, multi-day power outage a few months later. I mean, I'm in Center City Philadelphia, so my power never goes out, and when it does it's just a flicker or a few minutes, but still. Power outages are why god created home canning. 

Probably the biggest reason, though, that I don't keep a deep freeze is that my household doesn't eat much meat. And by "doesn't eat much" I mean "hardly ever eats." I appreciate that most households aren't like mine, and they do have meat with just about every dinner and lunch and often breakfast, too. Not our style, though. While I keep some cans of tunafish on hand, and I'll help prepare and consume the turkey at Thanksgiving, as a general rule I don't bring meat into the house. I've been vegetarian since the mid-1990s and my reasons for it are another post altogether -- the most relevant thing to say here is that, even if I did find a fantastic deal on whole chickens, or another household offered to go halfsies with me on a side of beef, it would do nothing for my pantry strategy. So . . . maybe a deep freeze full of vegetables or fruit? Since my household is so small, I can't get too excited about finding deals on bags of frozen broccoli. Seasonal vegetables are cheap in season, and we eat a lot of potatoes, beans, and acorn squash in the winter.

On the other hand, a deep freeze full of u-pick blueberries picked at $1.50/lb.? If a 15 cu. ft. chest freezer runs about $500.00 and costs (googling . . . googling) some $30.00/year to run, how many pounds of u-pick blueberries do I have to put into it before it pays for itself?