Home Preserving

This salsa is good, but not good enough to warrant making as much of it as I did last year. I am much more excited about tomatillo salsa which I am making and canning today. Canning what you like takes experimentation, it means sometimes you spend time canning things you don't like first.

It's the same with eating. I accidentally bought this yellow watermelon. I'm not a fan. It doesn't have as strong a flavor as the red kind does and it looks anemic to me. I can't feed it to my child who already has very strong views on what constitutes edible food, he has been eating lots of watermelon in the past couple of weeks which is fantastic! But I know without asking him that he will not take kindly to his watermelon changing color on him. He likes things to be "how they're supposed to be".

I've already admitted that there are some canned items that I would never have tried if my friends didn't make them first and twist my arm to force me to try them. Peach salsa is one of them. I actually like the peach salsa, but not enough to make some for myself. Jalapeno jelly sounded wrong. Just plain WRONG. Until I had some poured over cream cheese and eaten on crackers. I found myself unable to stop eating it. Pickled peaches- doesn't sound all that great but I actually liked it. Another one I tried was bread and butter pickles. I already knew I loathe sweet pickles so I was pretty sure I wouldn't like these. Yep. Any amount of sugar with my dills makes me want to gag.

See how, with ease, I bring us all back in time to the eighties with my words?

There are some recipes in my "Complete Book of Home Preserving" by Ball that I am reasonably sure I would rather be poked in the eye with a dirty needle than eat, and here they are:


Carrot Cake Jam- not only does it just sound awful...the idea of cake pulverized into a spread to put on toast, it uses canned pineapple. I have a problem canning foods whose ingredients include already canned foods. Twice canned pineapple- will there be any nutritive value left? And how old will it be when you finally get in the mood to eat your cake-jam? It's already likely at least a year old. I get in the mood for cake jam NEVER, so I'm guessing that pineapple will get very very old.

Sundae In A Jar- why do humans want to put everything in a jar? What is this twisted urge we have? What's good about a sundae, in my opinion, is the separate ingredients coming together suddenly on your spoon, and maybe beginning to mix as the ice cream melts. The idea of taking an ice cream sundae, letting the ice cream melt, and stirring all of the ingredients together in one great big sugar soup sounds repulsive to me. Granted, this recipe is just adding chocolate flavored liqueur to a batch of jam style fruit...but why? Why not open up a jar of strawberry sauce to pour over some ice cream and then pour some chocolate fudge on it?

Tropical Breeze Freezer Jam- again, with the previously canned ingredients! Add some mashed banana to the "jam", shredded coconut, and mandarin orange slices and you have food not fit for my chickens. Who would eat this on toast? I don't even want to think about how much like clumps of slug guts the banana must be like...nasty. This recipe is proof that humans will eat anything.

Jelly Bean Jelly- this is the worst of the worst. The only real food ingredient is apple juice. Dudes- this is a recipe for a jelly that will taste like jelly beans using flavoring oil concentrates and, if you like your jelly on the festive side, food coloring. This is not food. There is no reason to eat this. If you want the flavor of jelly beans, what is wrong with just eating some jelly beans? It's that charming notion of "food in a jar" which is Ball's way of trying to drum up interest in their jars in the non-canning sector of the populace. Anyway- is it true that some people, while eating jam on toast, really wish their jam tasted like jelly beans? No, don't tell me. I can't know this kind of stuff, it will make my head explode!


You must bear in mind that if you twist my arm hard enough I just might give in and try your proudly canned "Twinkies In A Jar" jam, but beware what I will force you to eat in return.