Saturday was the maiden voyage of my pressure canner, and it appears to have been successful. “Appears” I say, because we haven’t actually eaten anything I’ve canned, because that would be kind of beside the point.
We’re going to wait a week before we do that.
I canned four pints of green beans (the fourth pint wasn’t all that full, but it was close), and found it easier than I expected, once the beans were all snapped and washed and ready to go.
Which brings me to a question – what’s the difference between canning beans raw and canning them cooked? Doesn’t the processing actually cook the beans? Is it that you can fit more cooked beans in a jar, or is there some other reason?
I know someone out there knows the answer to this – tell me what the deal is, would you, please?
Also, while I’m asking, can you or can you not (har!) can summer squash? The Ball Blue Book doesn’t offer any information at all about canning it, only freezing it.
And lastly, thank you to those of you who recommended the Ball Blue Book. When I got the pressure canner, I eagerly looked through the manual, and I got seriously worried, because it made NO SENSE to me at all. One look through the Blue Ball Ball Blue Book, and I knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing. It’s awesome!
* * *
A few weeks ago I realized that I’d earned enough Fresh Step “Paw Points” to get a “snuggle sack” for the cats. So I ordered it, it came a lot faster than I expected, I took it out of the package, and left it on the floor near Fred’s desk until I could decide where to put it (probably the kitten room, I’m thinking).
Now, the Snuggle Sack has some of that crinkly stuff in it so that when a cat climbs in, it crinkles.
It sounds exactly – EXACTLY – like someone opening a bag of chips, and without fail when I first hear the noise I perk up and think “Who is eating yummy yummy chips, and why is no one sharing with me, and OH I hope they’re sour cream and onion!”, and then it is with great disappointment when I realize what I’m really hearing.
“I are not a bag o’ chips, muthah.”
* * *
If that bit above isn’t enough to convince you that I have the memory of a goldfish (the joke being that they have such tiny brains and short memory that they spend their life swimming around their bowl going “Oh! A castle!… Oh! A castle!”, etc.), I had the following discussion with myself no less than three times in the course of one hour.
“Oh, GROSS. What the hell is that, did Maxi kill a mole and leave it on the side step? I wish they wouldn’t DO THAT, now I have to go out the front door when I leave. Oh, it’s a leaf from the magnolia tree. Much better.”
Three times in the course of an hour, the same conversation, word-for-word, I swear it.
Finally I went out and kicked the leaf off the side of the stoop so it’d stop catching my eye.
* * *
The universe, it seems, does not want to let me get a single night’s sleep. If the spud isn’t calling me at 1 am to double-check her work schedule (AHEM, SPUD), the cats decide the middle of the night is an A-OK time for screeching and fighting and racing around and across my bed, or complete strangers are text messaging me.
Last night (this morning) at 12:50, my cell phone beeped to let me know I’d gotten a text message. I checked to see what it was, knowing it wasn’t the spud, because she was at home, sound asleep. It was a text message from a number that was completely unfamiliar to me (though it was local), and the message read
im so pissed off right now
I texted back a succinct and to-the-point
? and pretty quickly got back
sorry i texted the wrong number.
As I fell back to sleep, I amused myself with the thought that I could probably have carried on a complete conversation with this person (teenager, I assumed) using only symbols. Such as:
Them: im so pissed right now
Me: ?
Them: my parents are being ridiculous they dont trust me they always make me check in with them and they always make me run errands for them while they sit on their asses and do nothing
Me: !
Them: i hate it here, this place sucks, i should just run away
Me: š
And so forth.
* * *
Spanky giggles evilly about his thievery of Sugarbutt’s favorite place to sleep.
* * *
Previously
2006: No entry.
2005: Iād say this country is going to hell, but that handbasket sailed a loooooong time ago.
2004: Yes. Robyn DID recently learn how to do popup windows. Why do you ask?
2003: Do I LOOK like an outside kinda gal?
2002: Which is when I realized that I’d actually dreamed the conversation and hug and kiss.
2001: No entry.
2000: No entry.]]>
Hi Robyn,
Why don’t you send me a jar of those green beans and I will let you know how they taste??? And should you have some extra tomatoes I would be more then happy to sample those for you to!! Just thought I’ld offer :
They say that summer squashs will be too mushy if you can them. If you are going to use them in like say… Zuchini bread, there shouldn’t be a problem with that I guess. Although I am not the canning queen, I called my husbands Aunt who is indeed the canning queen and that’s what she said.
Love, Love the last pic!
And, thanks for the link.. the contest is going great.. the captions are hilarious! You so have to put up a caption, you are GREAT with those! LOL
Oh, one more thing… you sound like me with the mole conversation! I swear on all that’s holy, I went into the laundry room to get something and had to stand there for FIVE, no lie, FIVE minutes until it came back to me what I went in there for. I grabbed the rug and contemplated at what age I would wind up in a home!
Mmmmm.. I love canned greenbeans – they look yummy!
That last pic of the kitty roaring is hysterical!
We have a friend that also has a very very bad memory. My husband bought a small fish bowl and a mutual friend bought a little tiny castle for her for her birthday many years ago. They sit on top of her tv. Many times she’ll sign her Emails – the goldfish.
There is a crack in the tile under the dishwasher door that you can only see as the door is opening that makes me think “ACCCK a Spider!!!!” EVERY SINGLE TIME. I’ve lived there for 7 years.
Right, what Carol H said: I think the texture of squash gets funny if you cook it for canning. Freezes great, though! The summer I planted enough zucchini for everyone in, say, Lichtenstein, I grated zucchini and froze it in batches for zucchini bread, and it worked fine.
I’m so glad the Ball Blue Book has been helpful. As I recall, it has good instructions for freezing corn, too.
If anyone’s curious, all our vegetables taste like THE SWEAT OFF MY BROW.
mmmmmm. sweaty vegetables.
And, just so you know, I also see Blue Ball Book every time I see that.
Shirley made me afraid of pressure cookers. It went right along with the whole, THE FURNACE COULD EXPLODE!” thing. I’m thinking I was a victim of child abuse. Heh.
a) I typed in “butchypoo” – ha! I kill me!
b) what kind of canner did you get? We’re thinking about it, if’n it’s easy enough for us lazy types š
I’m SUCH a coward when it comes to pressure cookers and that sort of thing. Hell, I’ve been known to run screaming and flapping my arms ineffectually when the top blew off the popcorn popper. Pressure cookers could — I’m *positive* — blow the roof right off of the house. There’ll be no pressure cooking in my kitchen.
And canning… well, in my hands, canning would be a healthy serving of botulism just waiting to happen. Either that, or else the contents would expand and then the jars would explode and there’d go the roof right off of the house. Nope, no canning done in my kitchen either.
Anyone for raw peas fresh from the farmers’ market? THAT I can do!
Canned summer squash tastes like shit. It gets too mushy. I tried it one year, what a waste. The canning process cooks the green beans. So if you canned cooked beans, you would have very mushy beans YUCK!
Are you using canning salt or are you doing the salt-free thing?
Bobbie Sue
Have Fred check out “Joy of Gardening.” It will show how to do wide rows to help eliminate most of your weed pulling issues. I loved the last year I did the garden that way. He also shows how to plant year to year so that you do not lose nutrients and stuff from the soil.
Bobbie Sue
My Mom shreads zucchini and squash for breads and then freezes them. And passes them along to me, as well, yum.
canned squash = baby food! Uck!
I know you know this, but if you don’t hear the pressure thingy going “ticky ticky ticky” haul ass and turn off the heat while ducking. My husband blew the lid off a pressure cooker because something had blocked the vent from the inside…It was very impressive. It could have easily taken his head off.
It was also very funny (no one got hurt) because he was at an out door BBQ cooking contest and the noise of the explosion was so loud that 100 guys ducked all at the same time and every one of them came up saying “holy shit, what was that!”
DelMonte, or someone used to have a canned zuchinni w/tomatoes that wasn’t ALL that bad in texture. I discovered it at the Army commisary in Germany, but haven’t looked for it in years, since zuchinni is so readily available stateside.