Canning Season

Canning SeasonFall is the season of fruit, lots of fruit. And most fruit doesn’t keep well on its own (except for Melrose apples, folk say that only a rock keeps better than a Melrose). Plums and pears and early apples need to be dried or crushed for cider or made into pies or canned as sauces and butters.

This weekend it was time to deal with the plum crop, time to make plum butter and Autumn butter – a blend of plum, apples and pear. Problem is, butters need to be in jars and I was low on jars. This pretty much happens every year. You see, I give away some of the jam I make. Every time a jar is handed to a friend or the UPS man or the mail delivery lady – that means a canning jar goes out of circulation. After a while, I need to buy some new jars. Normally this is not a problem. I just mosey down to our local jar emporium, also known as the hardware store, and I pick up what I need.

But not this year, not in 2020. All those folks who discovered gardening last spring and summer seem to have discovered canning this fall. And they bought jars. The shelves are bare of the standard jars. I hunted for pint jars and ended up getting fancy ones, packaged in a four pack for the same price of a dozen of the plain ones. But I wasn’t complaining. I was glad to find any jars and at least new jars come with the lid and the rim. I didn’t see boxes of lids or rims anywhere.

I thought I had enough jars, but the plum crop was a big one and I cooked up a vat of plum butter. As I started canning, I realized I was short about four jars. I started hunting the shelves in the kitchen and pantry. I found one, then two. I searched my office and discovered a collection of pencils residing in a pint jar. I dumped the pencils into a mug and liberated the jar. One more, I just needed one more. Somewhere in this house, there had to be a pint jar. Back to the kitchen, rummaging through the pantry drawers. There it was, a pint jar halfway full of a golden crab apple liquor. I’m not one to toss out an elixir like that, so I poured the lovely apple scented alcohol into a leftover bottle, washed out the jar and put it in the hot water canner to sterilize.

Today’s canning project is done. The jars are cooling on the counter. I am finished for now. But, If you see pint jars at a local hardware store, let me know. After all there will be boiled cider to can in October. Harvest season isn’t near over yet…

Blackberry Blitz

In the Pacific Northwest, Blackberries are a weed, a scourge, a thorny enemy, and – briefly, in the fall when the berries are ripe – a delight. We have way too many blackberries. The vines stretch through the fences. They blanket old stumps. They sneak into the vegetable garden and fling themselves into the pumpkin patch and try to barricade the corn. We cut them back, dig them up, try to destroy them. This doesn’t work, blackberries are tough, they come back year after year.

But in the fall, we have a truce. The thorny vines dangle their lovely ripe berries over the fences and I -carefully- pick them. I pick a couple colanders full every day. Some of the berries I process right away into cordials or bake into cakes or simple eat fresh by the handful. Most of the berries go into the freezer to be made into jams and syrups during a less busy time of the year. I try to remove the seeds from most of the berries. The seeds are just the right size to get stuck in molars or between teeth. That distracts from the lovely, summery flavors of the jams.

Usually a friend brings over her vintage Squeezo Strainer and we process bags of thawed berries. It is a day of jam making and conversation. But she moved away and I had to come up with another solution. I tried a Norpro SauceMaster with a berry screen. It did remove the seeds, but it had a habit of splurting out the resulting pulp. I moved the whole operation outdoors where I could rinse off my work area with a hose afterwards. Despite the mess, the jam turned out to be wonderful.

Blackberries, blue berries, berries for jam! I used to make jam in the summer with berries just picked. They went from the picking bowl to the jam kettle. But there is so much to do in the summer: gardens to weed and water, horses to ride, and that afternoon wind can send a sailboat flying across Puget Sound. Nowdays those just picked berries go into the freezer, after all the associated insects have had a few moments to consider their fate and let go of the berries. Protein is a good thing in one’s diet, but I do try to avoid deep freezing members of the insect world. It doesn’t take long for the freezer to fill up with casually labeled bags, “Mixed Berries, 2008.” Then in the fall when the rain starts and the wind blows and gray is the predominant color in the sky, we create the fragrances of summer. The berries are poured into a big pot on the stove. We search the basement for the canning jars and sometimes run to the store for more canning lids, jars and pectin. The jars are scrubbed and set out to dry all over the kitchen. The old black enamaled canner is hunted down, filled with water, and sits regally on the stovetop steaming and ready for the jars. Once again we go through the tradition of ‘putting food by’. The berries of summer became jams to grace muffins and scones baked in the cold winter months. Yes, we could buy jam in the stores, but it would be so predictable. When we make it, it may be jam or it may be syrup. We always try cutting back the sugar, so sometimes our jam doesn’t set. If it remains fairly liquid, we simply change the label and give our friends jars of gleaming red or purple syrups to serve over morning pancakes. We have the freedom to combine various fruits and berries, raspberries and cherries go very well together. And many years we made Autumn Sauce with apples, pears, and small purple plums. Maybe this year, I’ll make a Summer/Autumn Sauce, a hybrid of summer berries and fall fruit. That could be a fine tasting blend…