The Lost Art of Canning

Canning. You don't here about it much anymore. It's still there and it will never go away, but with all the advances in modern food storage technologies, home canning as well as gardening is just not something most people do anymore. Its one of those skills that seems to have gone by the wayside, like quilting and sewing, making beer and wine and cheese and bread, things that are very simple by nature, but are becoming less common as the years go by. Of course there are people that still do these things but in our current fast-paced, iPhone 33geez society, most everybody buys their pickles at Walmart these days and why wouldn't you.

To give a little back story on this, and to go ahead and say, this curiosity in canning is not something that happened yesterday. This is something that's been growing, progressing, maturing for a few years now. I started making this salsa that was really good and the recipe made so much that a lot of it ended up getting thrown out because I am alone, but I am not lonely. Maybe just a little. Anyway, naturally I started to think about canning. I mean you can buy salsa at the grocery store, that hideous picante stuff. The stuff that people at super bowl parties gobble up by the gallon. I think they even sell it in gallons and probably five gallon buckets. But this salsa is different. I think I got the recipe from one of those celebrity chefs. This salsa is not meant to be sold in gallons to be mass-consumed. It's better than that, and I wanted to selfishly keep some for myself to have later if I wanted. So obviously this is the point in my life where I learn to preserve the delicious foods I make so I can have them forever. And by forever I mean a couple of weeks to a few months.

As I begin to enter my world of canning, of course, I want to start with simplest, easiest method and the easiest foods to can. This is the water bath method and the easiest foods to can are those with a high acid content such as salsa. So this weekend this is what's happening. We'll be making and canning delicious salsa and with any luck the results will be fabulous.