I am busy right now going to farmers markets and hunting down the best produce and veggies to stock my pantry with. I will be making raspberry& blackberry syrup, applesauce, plum conserve, pear butter, apple butter as well as my various fruit leathers and dried fruits this season. What does your garden grow? What do you want to can? I grew up with 40 fruit trees growing down our driveway in the country so I watched my mom can and learned how to preserve the process when it came to my kids. Each Christmas I choose to give away some of my jams/jellies that I know my family members love. It is expensive to mail, but they are sure happy with the end results and nothing says "I am thinking of you" better than a can of homemade goodies! I usually make spiced blueberry jam, cranberry jelly, triple berry blend, and strawberry jam to pass out to the neighbors and my family at holiday time. What are your family's favorite time honored recipes and do you still can for your family today? I'd love to hear from you!
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You say you want a can-volution? Well, you need to know Sean Timberlake.
Timberlake is a professional writer and author of
the blog Hedonia. He's also the founder of
Punk Domestics, a Web site devoted to all things do-it-yourself food - from pickles and jams to goodies in cans.
When it comes to preservation, Timberlake admits even learned people and accomplished home cooks are oftentimes stymied by the fear of poisoning their loved ones with a tainted jar of fig jam (Mmm...botulism!).
While there are real risks, follow a few rules and Sean assures you'll be safely jamming in no time.
Five Myths About Canning: Sean Timberlake
1. My home-canned foods will poison me and my loved ones.
"You will absolutely, positively not bring disease and death into your home by canning - so long as you follow the rules. Modern food preservation techniques are designed to eradicate the pathogens that can cause illness, thereby rendering your foods shelf-stable.
In fact, properly canned foods are about the safest things you can eat. But a modicum of attention must be paid to a few fundamentals to ensure that all the bugaboos that can get you are tamed."
2. My grandmother canned in the oven/used paraffin wax/turned jars upside-down while canning, and no one died, so it’s safe.
"There are a myriad of tools and practices that have been employed throughout the last couple centuries to can food. However, the
USDA has established a recommended practice using mason jars with two-part lids, canned upright in a water bath or pressure canner. This recommendation is unimpeachable, and should be adhered to to ensure safety."
3. The lids on my jars sealed, so the contents are safely canned.
"It’s so enormously satisfying to hear the
high-pitched pings of lids sealing as they come out of the canner, but that doesn’t mean what’s inside is safe to eat. In order to kill off the bacteria that causes botulism,
the contents must be sufficiently acidic, having a pH 4.6 or lower.
Most fruits are high in acid, which makes them excellent candidates for preserves that can be canned using the water bath method. But unpickled vegetables, meats and many soups and sauces are not, and require pressure canning to destroy the botulinum bacteria.
How can you tell the pH of your recipe? Unless you’re a chemist, you can’t, so make sure you’re using a tested recipe from a reliable source. If you don’t know your recipe is safe for water bath canning, store it in the refrigerator or freezer (or in your belly) instead."
4. Canning is for people in big houses in the country, not me in my tiny urban kitchen.
"We are blessed to live in an age when gorgeous, ripe fruits and vegetables can be harvested at local farms and transported to markets in the very heart of even the densest cities on the very same day. If you want to hang on to that bounty well after the season’s over, canning is probably your best bet.
Other than a pot large enough to submerge your jars in boiling water, the other equipment required will fit in a drawer. Working in small batches ensures you don’t end up with mountains of jars all over your house."
5. Canning is hard.
"Do you find cooking hard? If so, then maybe this is true for you. Like cooking, though, canning is a process, so take the time to set up your space and develop a workflow. Have everything ready in its place for each step of the process and you’ll find that it goes quickly, is easier than you imagined and even fun.
It’s also an excellent activity to do with friends and family; after all, many hands make light work. And when you hear those lids popping as they cool, your heart will swell with pride and you’ll already start planning your next trip to the farmers market for another round of canning."
Ok, some of you may think that I am being too harsh but when the industry as a whole has to stop and AGAIN revist how couponers are shopping and how some are essentially cheating the "system" it begs the question: Are you too extreme? You have to look at how the TLC show is changing the face of couponing in such a hard economic times, when people are scrambling to save every cent they can. Some say that it is great: "allowing people to learn how to coupon and bringing coupon habits to the forefront as a means for people to learn to become savvy shoppers", and some are very upset at how a show has spun the industry into a full blown panic mode. I am among those who are very upset at some of the practices that people employ on this show and that the TLC show is exploiting bad couponers who are essentially ruining the industry for EVERYONE! 
