Yes, We Can, oh, We Can-Can!!

(With all due apologies to the Pointer Sisters for the awful punning reference in today's title!) Go on, ask me what I've been doing lately....I dare you! Ask me why it is that I haven't posted for so long! You got it! It's canning season! See, last year's garden was amazing and bountiful, but I felt like some of the food was going to waste.....a grievous sin to my Scot soul; so this year, I decided that I would can/freeze/dry/smoke/powder/whatever it took to keep from wasting food. Yeah.....so who couldn't have guessed that I would be up to my eyeballs in jars of pickles, tomatoes, sauces, salsas, preserves? I mean, besides me, of course. Needless to say, it's been a bit crazy around here.

Before I go into nauseating detail about my life amongst Ball jars, I just wanted to point your attention to the blue square to the left of my daily (okay, not so daily, lately) posts. "Blog with Integrity" is a movement amongst those of us who not only have enough time on our hands to write about the daily minutiae of our lives so that all you wonderful Gentle Readers know WAY too much about us, but we actually have enough time to worry about the honesty of our blogs. It seems that some of the Mommy Blogs out there on the 'Net actually make their creators money. What an interesting concept! I'm all for that; it would be fracking awesome if I could help supplement the budget around our happy homestead by writing. BUT: The way some of the Mommy Blogs out there have been making money is to endorse products or stores or people or whatever in exchange for cash. Apparently, this situation has grown to the point that one cannot trust that whatever one is reading on the 'Net was written because, by Gosh!, the writer was so impressed by this or that product/store/person/whatever, that she just had to sit right down right then and share her wonder with the blogging world! (You can't trust what you read on the Internet? Say it ain't so!) It could possibly, just possibly, be an entry that was written in exchange for money, and that writer is actually being less-than-sincere in her admiration of said product! Or worse, it might even be a professional writer posing--dare I say?--posing as a Mommy blogger! I know, I know! The horror of it all! *Tongue is now permanently glued to cheek*

Anyway, even though I would absolutely adore to paid for my writing, and the thought of monetary compensation just for adding my thoughts to the Posterity that is the Internet makes me downright giddy; and even though I don't think I quite qualify as a Mommy Blogger, I promise you right here and now that I have never received a dime for any of the books, or products, or stores or websites that I have recommended in the almost year-and-a-half that I have been blathering about my backyard garden--and I probably never will. And should I somehow pull off that miracle known as corporate sponsorship in the future, I promise I will be forthright and up-front about it, and I will let you know that I have, in fact, received money from this or that crowd. But, in all fairness, I think I should point out to whatever potential sponsors that might be hovering around my blog out of extreme boredom/desperation that even if you were to give me money to write about your product; if your product sucks, I won't hesitate to let the world know your product sucks. AND I'll keep the money. So there!

Okay, enough of that, back to canning. Like I said, I now know more about mason jars than I ever thought I would. I can't help but think back to my days in high school when I was forced (and I do mean forced) to take Home Ec class. I wanted to take Shop; I thought learning to fix cars and construct shelves would be wwaaayyyyy more useful than making an apron, but nnnnnooooo; I was a girl, I had no business swinging a hammer (they'd obviously not met my mom at that point); I needed to know how to make a comfy home for that Wonderful Guy that I would surely snare! Right.... (this was 1972, kids--about the time that women were beginning to really think that men might be their equals...mostly)

Upshot: I skipped Home Ec as often as I could get away with it. I didn't like the teacher, I didn't like cooking, I didn't care about sewing because I already knew how, I didn't care about snaring that Wonderful Guy. And now, here it is, 37 years later (oy!), and I cook and I sew and I did snare that Wonderful Guy. And I realize that my teacher wasn't awful, she was just behind the times in her thinking that the proper way to dust and vacuum a house was an essential priority in a woman's learning process. AND I wish I'd paid more attention to that class sometimes, like when we went over the archaic science known as preserving foods. But, no, you know me--I gotta learn it all the hard way! Altogether now: RESEARCH!

I've already talked about the two books that I've been using to preserve all this yummy goodness that Mother Nature has flattened us with, but they're both worth mentioning again: Canning, Freezing and Drying by the Editors of Sunset Books and Sunset Magazine; and, if you don't happen to plant enough vegetables to feed the North American continent, you should probably get The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard. Both are available through Amazon (and probably elsewhere, I just happen to favor Amazon), just click on the titles and you'll be linked to them. No compensation here, they both just happen to be good books with easy-to-read instructions.

My cucumber vines are (finally!) starting to wind down their production: Good thing, too, because I sincerely doubt I can foist any more pickles off on friends and family! Dig this:


And this:
Now, son Seamus and I are absolute cucumber addicts; we both could, unprovoked, eat our weights in cucumbers daily! But even the two of us couldn't keep us with those two cucumber vines I planted! So, in sheer desperation, I've turned to pickling them: I've made dills, bread and butter pickles, even hamburger chips. Jars and jars of them! So, of course, I needed help:
The Wonder Hubby to the rescue!


Which resulted in a counter top that looked like this:And a stove top that was beginning to resemble a corner of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory:







But we now now have jars and jars of pickles. Matter of fact, if Vlasic is invaded tomorrow by pickle-eating aliens who wipe out the company's entire inventory, you can rest assured that the good ol' USA will still be in good-standing pickle-wise, just from my two backyard vines. Yes, by golly, the Wonder Hubby and I would patriotically haul our pickle jars to Washington D.C. itself, just to make sure that the President and Congress would not have to eat their hamburgers pickle-less. We would be honored to do so!

Of course, we would expect to be paid.......

(more canning news tomorrow, along with some recipes.....I promise!)