Canning, My Dad's Legacy

My Dad lived through the Great Depression and because of that he was determined to be ready if another one every occurred. 

Canning food and gardening was a big part of my childhood, so I guess it got passed on to me. 

I remember helping with some of the canning when I was a kid. I only helped when my parents were making jelly. My job was to pick fruit and stir the pot waiting for a rolling boil. My siblings helped too of course. 

I remember one particular time when we were making grape jelly and my hands got stained purple from working with the grapes. At school, a classmate noticed my purple hands and got so curious about our jelly making that she came over to help. I rememb
er that she wanted to know how many grapes it took to make a jar of jelly. I had no idea.

I have since made prickly pear and other jellies but the one thing I never did was pressure canning. I remember Mom telling stories that she'd heard of pressure cookers "blowing up". All these years I have been afraid to even try. 

Yesterday I tried pressure canning for the first time and even though I was pretty nervous about doing something wrong, everything was fine. I know it's not a big deal for most but it was for me. 

Learning to pressure can opens a whole new world, especially as far as canning meat. We all remember power outages during past winter storms. An outage of any length of time can ruin everything in the freezer. Have some canned meat helps to minimize this. 

There are tons of videos on You Tube about canning and they were a big help. I would also recommend the Ball canning book for instructions as well as of course your pressure cooker's manual.