So the other day I tried my hand at canning apples. We took The Peanut apple picking a few weeks earlier and had an incredible surplus. As we were soon departing for our trip to the other side of the world it seemed a shame to let them go to waste.
The concept of canning had always seemed simple, yet daunting. Despite having relatively few steps, it always struck me as something that required a lot of experience and fancy equipment. “What the hell?” I figured, I’d just give it a shot. We had all the required equipment so I abandoned the reckless and dove head long into an applesauce recipe. Applesauce is something that is insanely easy to make. And the apples we had were flavorful enough that I didn’t even add any spices. So next came the canning.
Canned food is a wonderful invention. It became even more wonderful with the invention of the easy pop lid which eliminated the need to search for a can opener to gain access to your chicken noodle soup. One thing that struck me though as I was preparing my canning jars was exactly that. They were jars. So in reality, wasn’t I really jarring? Wasn’t I really creating jarred food? I wondered this to The Cheese Puff (with whom I was talking though this whole experience) and heard nothing but silence in response, which I took to mean I had had a thought so profound that she was deep in thought about just how stable her grasp of reality was.
I did learn two very important lessons for my next jarring adventure: 1) I need to use a much bigger pot when I use the larger jars. There was a lot of water splashing over the sides of the pot during the processing stage. 2) If I’m going to be doing apples again (which is highly likely) I must invest in an apple peeler/corer.
I didn’t get any in process pictures as I was busy making an incredible mess and regaling The Cheese Puff with the deepest thoughts of the universe. However, I did get this picture of the results:
Of course now we’re left to see how good a job I did, and whether or not this will be food or poison by the time we get home…
Infinitely Expanding 