at one time canning produce from green beans, tomatoes, and pickles to preserves, jelly, and jam was serious business for my grandmother and grandfather who lived through the great depression and raised a large garden every year. i took part in the process from a young age helping out with various tasks appropriate to my age and skill set.
these days i maintain my canning skills with things like salsa, preserves, and such. two days ago while i was having a long visit with my mother i put up 2 pints of cayenne pepper sauce, 5 pints of tomatoes and 11 pints + 2 quarts of salsa. some friends of my mom had given her two bushels of tomatoes along with a peck of jalapenos and half a peck of cayenne peppers. next week when i go back to visit i’ll make 12-14 pints of blackberry jam.
i used to like pickles but i lost my taste for them 20-22 years ago.
Well I’ll be damned. It’s not 50 glasses of water, but maybe 40, and that’s still a fuckton* of water. It’s about four times what I’d normally consume in the course of a day, and I drink a lot of water.
*an imperial fuckton, not a metric fucktonne.
Hyponatremia sucks. It’s happened to me on occasion, and it always feels like I’m literally about to die.
I second these. I have a set for the wide-mouth mason jars, and the small ones, so nearly every size they sell works. I’ve made the best sauerkraut of my life using their recipe. Also, the white kimchi was phenomenal.
Spicy is definitely more my thing, but it was so different I think we ended up just snacking on it right out of the jar over the weeked until it was all gone. It has this subtle complexity that doesn’t come through in my preferred topping of fermented chili paste. It’s also such a short, simple ferment that it’s hard to feel bad using the time if it ends up not being your thing.
Napoleon thought pickles made his armies strong and offered $250,000 to anyone who could develop a way to preserve food safely. -Buzzfeed
well, almost:
Napoleon’s Food Preservation Prize (1795)
“Napoleon offered 12,000 francs to improve upon the prevailing food preservation methods of the time. Not surprisingly, the purpose was to better feed his army “when an invaded country was not able or inclined to sell or provide food”. Fifteen years later, confectioner Nicolas François Appert claimed the prize. He devised a method involving heating, boiling and sealing food in airtight glass jars — the same basic technology still used to can foods.” -NPR
I like a mix of about 40 percent small cukes, 40 percent pepperoncini, and 20 percent aji peppers, in a brine with some garlic. The cukes come out fantastic.
Kinda sorta, but since I am a container gardener due to back problems I stick to what produces well in containers. Tomatoes, peppers, cukes, greens. Carrots and cauliflower I buy at the market.