We Know Mother, We Read the Book

The two books we liked best.

Despite have grown up in rural America my Health Nut Sister and I are lacking in some very basic rural America skill. One of those skills is food preservation, mostly canning because I can freeze the hell out of things. So when my Health Nut Sister and I decided we wanted to start canning, I did what I always do...I read a lot of books on the topic.

I now believe I am an expert canner even though I have only spent two days doing it, but I read 4 books and several blog posts about canning. You may be thinking to yourself. "Girl Named Michael, I don't think that makes you an expert." And you would probably be right but heck I read a book so I am good.

So a canning we will go, and it was surprisingly easy and time consuming. Tomorrow I will share the process, what we canned and our recipes. Right now I want to share the experience we had with our new adventure.

After a late start (my niece got a ring stuck on her finger and it was starting to swell...she is okay now) we started washing all the vegetables for tomato sauce...there was an air of excitement and energy in my Health Nut Sister poorly laid out kitchen. This was our grand adventure and after all our planning it was finally happening.

After cooking our sauce we get down to the business of canning. The steps are not the hard its just takes a long time. And for every step we referenced one of the books we read to make sure we were doing it right. You would think my Health Nut Sister and were striking gold the way we were acting.

After we processed the first batch every time we heard the "pop" we would get excited and giggle. Like a bunch of tweens about to meet which ever teen star is in vogue this week. It was very exciting to be creating something and to REALLY be in control of  what you eat. It is a very freeing feeling.

On the second day we canned Nectarines and despite being tired we were still excited to be canning. On this day our mom joined us. And while we were canning she keep saying different stuff about canning and giving us advice. My sister and I just looked at her and said over and over, "We know mom, we read the book" or occasionally, "That's not what the book said." My mom's response was, "If you would have asked me you would't have to read the book." My eye rolling and sarcastic answer to that was, "I would have read the book anyway. It's what I do."

Please come back tomorrow and I will share the steps to canning and Wednesday the recipes.