Pickles!

Canning season is here!  I'm super excited (or at least, I'm gonna fake it til I make it).  This is my first summer as a canner.  Last year, my sister and I learned how to can at the of the summer, so we missed most of summer's bounty.

There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to canning.  First and foremost, you need a trusted recipe and you need to follow that recipe to the letter.  I am the kind of person who never met a recipe she didn't tweak, but when it comes to canning, NO TWEAKING ALLOWED.  Second, you need a canner.  Most people start with water bath canning before progressing to pressure canning.  I actually use an old stock pot that is literally big enough for me to climb into.  Other tools that will help are a funnel, a head-space measure, a jar grabber, and a magnet.  The only one of those things that I have is a jar grabber.

The complexity of the canning process is entirely dependent on what you are canning.  Pickles are a super easy "intro to canning."

Last weekend, my mother-in-law invited me over to pick veggies from her garden.  I walked away with 10 pounds of pickling cucumbers.  Over the course of the intervening week (between working on my bathroom and trying to fix a faulty sewing machine), I turned all those gorgeous cukes into pickles.

I used a recipe from SB Canning because her website is well-known and trusted.  I followed her recipe for dill pickles and canned 12 pints of pickles.

I had one guy who didn't want to seal, so I stuck it in the fridge.  I did some as spears and some as slices.  The only thing I changed was the spices.  Instead of adding each spice separately, I used a "pickling spice" from McCormick.