Kick Out The Jams

"The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday - but never jam today.” - Lewis Carroll

Something we've wanted to do for some time is start preserving food in a way that wouldn't require refrigeration or freezing. Hopefully someday when we have a little more control of our housing (i.e. not renting or renting from a landlord that will allow us to downsize appliances), we'd like to significantly downsize our refrigeration since it is such an energy drain.

Over a period of time we slowly worked on building up a supply for canning as we could afford to do so. We bought a canning kit with the pressure cooker and all of the tools needed for safe canning, then we bought a couple of cases of pint jars. We also were gifted a case of quart jars from a friend who moved out of the area which helped tremendously.

I had no prior experience with canning. It was always something that fascinated me (you mean people save food in glass jars for later? that's possible?) but also was a bit scary because it was different. And seemingly very time consuming. My partner had canned jams and jellies many years ago, so thankfully she was more comfortable and was able to help me step through my first experience. The result?

Our first round of blueberry jam! Both our preserved food and my confidence levels increased.

We received a bounty of 12 pints of fresh organic blueberries from our local food pantry with our weekly pick-up. It was almost as if some sort of cosmic providence was prompting us, serendipitously saying, "You've been preparing for this, now it's time to do it." And so we did. Our son devours blueberries, so we only chose to preserve four pints. While there certainly was some effort involved, I was pleasantly surprised by how little time it actually took. We read through the recipe a couple of times in advance and followed it to the letter. We ended up with the four perfectly sealed and set jars you see in the photo above. Success! I immediately felt empowered and confident that I could can our own food to save for later and spread out our food to be more resilient. And I don't mind saying that we made some very tasty jam. The first jar we opened was proof that making it ourselves was most assuredly worth the effort and far superior to store-bought jams and jellies.

We wanted to make mango jam from a bounty of mangoes we received from the food pantry, but we ended up not having enough to do so. Here's where the boosted confidence came in handy. I had read through the recipes for jellies and preserves some, and did plenty of online research on the "theory" behind canning and making canning recipes. Really fascinating stuff! Even with what we had remaining for blueberries after our son and our previous canning, we didn't have enough to even do blueberry mango jam. So we improvised. We ended up portioning out what we hoped was enough mango, blueberries, and apple juice (store bought unfortunately) to make enough of a fruit base for the box of pectin. The results?

Our second round of jam! Feeling totally empowered now.

It worked! We had a proper seal on all four jars and the jam set nicely. We still haven't tasted it yet to know whether it's a good flavor combination, but the process worked. If it tastes good, we promise to share the recipe.

We have visions of moving on to canning carrots (we always seem to have an overabudance of carrots, but thankfully they naturally keep long anyhow) and making pickles (our son loves pickles, too). So far everything we've done has been processed in a boil bath, which is a lot easier and less scary. I'm thinking pickles would be a nice progression for confidence building, but carrots may be the next push from necessity. Have I mentioned we get a lot of carrots? The scary part for me is that we'll have to process the carrots in the pressure cooker, and using a pressure cooker is very foreign to me and rather intimidating. But after some great success with making jams, I'm feeling a little less afraid of venturing into unknown canning territory.