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When I was little I loved that time of year when the garden started coming in and it was time to put up the vegetables. Some of my favorite memories as a kid involved sitting for hours and breaking green beans, in fact one of my favorite pictures of my niece MacKenzie is her sitting in the middle of a large bowl of snapped green beans eating them raw. Sure, it would get old after a while but that was the time to see my extended family all laugh and talk for hours as we tried to not let anything from our gardens go to waste.
One year when I was very young, I saw how scary canning can be when a jar of beans exploded on the stove while my Uncle was trying to get the jars out of the water. Glass and beans filled the trailer kitchen and living room where we were all sitting, breaking more beans. The injuries were minor but the mess was terrible. From that point on I never asked to be taught how to actually do the canning.
The more work I do around Appalachian issues, the more I realize I need to learn how my parents did things so that I can appreciate it more. So this week I bought a box of tomatoes from a local farmer here in North Carolina and called my mom for the directions on how to can. I could hear the doubt in her voice as she walked me through the process, after she asked me why in the world was I doing this? So this evening after work I sat out to can my first ever jars of tomatoes.
What I learned through this process is that it takes hours to do this task. From the washing, coring, skinning, cooking, sterilizing and then the actual canning, this is a major task. I also realized how much I missed my family on this endeavor, I just imagined conversation would have made this process so much more enjoyable, however Janis Joplin singing “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz” did make my evening in the kitchen fun. I’m not going to go into how to can tomatoes, because as I realized tonight the internet is full of bloggers who have already done this for you, and thank God because I’m pretty sure my mom turned her phone off as she anticipated I would try calling her 10 times for questions.
The reward, and reader I can’t even begin to tell you how satisfying it is, is when you hear the little pop pop pop noises as the lids seal. It’s instant gratification of a job well done, and knowledge that this winter my soups will be delicious and unprocessed.
Now I understand why people who can, can for life. There’s such a sense of pride at the end of all those hours in the kitchen that makes you want to can everything insight. Next on my list, apple butter!