Our first foray into canning

We went to Wal-Mart on Saturday, bought a boiler with a rack, a bunch of jars and lids and a kit with a funnel and a jar-grabber, brought them home and sat on the bed leafing through the various canning books and pamphlets Cristy has accumulated over the years. She collects cookbooks, and likes especially those old pamphlets put out by the Ball jar company or PNM or the local county extension that tells young homemakers how to cook with gas or make green chile stew or whatever.

On Sunday we decided to make and can salsa and peach preserves.

We used the "Traditional Salsa" recipe from the Ball company web site. Not much of interest to report here, since making salsa is about as easy as making a salad. The canning thing was a rather large production considering we had four pints to work with. You'd think we were trying to build a cold fusion reactor or something, the way we were huddled over the stove, monitoring temperatures and referring to the books open on the table. We barely argued, such was our concentration. Cristy kept saying, "And we're not fighting!"

Did the salsa work? I guess. No way to tell until it spoils or doesn't. There was a little left over for us to taste. The recipe calls for 1/2 cup vinegar, which I think might be too much, but it's pretty good anyway.

Next up was the peach preserves. The recipe says that after you put the peaches in the sugar and water, you boil it and then let it sit for "12 to 18 hours." Which means that we would have to get up in the morning to finish the job, which means getting up slightly earlier than usual, which is, to Cristy, a crippling hardship, judging by the look on her face when I mention this. We agree to "get up when the alarm goes off" instead of sleeping for another hour as we usually do.

In the morning I jumped out of bed as soon as the clock radio came on, excited about the delightful task ahead of canning delicious peach preserves. I put the water on for the coffee and for the jars and prepared things a little bit. Cristy got up and as soon as the water reached 180F we put the stuff into cans.

And then we started to fight.

I must have read the directions for the preserves twenty times, but this one little troubling detail had not really seemed important until right then: the directions say to fill the jars up to 1/4 inch to the top with peaches, then add syrup up to 1/4 to the top. So we filled the first jar up to 1/4 inch from the top and then discovered that that did not leave any room in the jar for any syrup. Hm. What could we have possibly done wrong? My instinct was to blame Cristy, so I went with that. The evidence was clear: the instructions were from her book and she had wanted to do peach preserves and we didn't have any problems like this with my salsa, so it must be her fault. I guess I made my feelings a little plainer than might have been called for, which made filling the other three jars a little less of a fun adventure in food preservation than they should have been because she said something unpleasant back which led me to belive that my instincts were correct as usual and the whole 1/4-1/4 Peach Syrup Fiasco of Ought-Seven was indeed somehow her fault.

We sealed the jars and put them in the water bath and twenty minutes later took them out and put them on the counter to cool off.

After we had re-read the instructions another fifty times we gave up trying to figure out what had gone wrong and sat at the table glowering at each other over our coffee. Eventually we decided to agree that although she had acted in a grouchy manner, my manner had been slightly grouchier. I was willing to live with this compromise because my coffee was activating my compassionate nature and I realized that it was she who was going to have to live out the rest of her life knowing that she was the owner of a booklet of defective canning directions.

And that was our first foray into canning.