I've learned a whole new appreciation for the good works of my mother's hands. Yesterday, I chopped, cooked, and canned 6  half pint jars of Bruschetta, and blanched and froze 8 quarts of tomatoes. All this bounty from our  little 6 x 12 garden! It would have been a lot easier day if I'd realized that I needed pickling salt, and sea salt wasn't a good substitute the first time I went to the grocery.. Pickling salt contains no iodine and won't discolor or cloud your canned food. So, that meant a second trip to the grocery for the day. They had the pickling salt but no fresh basil , which meant taking a longer ride around the city to the west side where you could count on the groceries to stock such luxury items as fresh basil.  It was a beautiful day, so it wasn't a great sacrifice to take the longer scenic route on my bad motor scooter. I have my own basil but the poor plants been almost whittled down to a nubbins from the convenience of just being a step out the back door from the stove-top. It was just a little scary trying out the new pressure cooker, but it worked exactly as they said it would from start to end. While reading The Feast Nearby I learned that the canning jars containing store brand  spaghetti  aren't good enough quality to reuse, so I recycled all the ones I wasn't using to contain dried beans or nuts. The possibility that reused store brand jars could break inside the pressure cooker was incentive enough to go out and purchase new jars, lids, and rings.

I did pick up one indispensable tool that made the work easier.


I like the way it had rubber at both ends, so if you left it resting in boiling water, it didn't burn you the next time you picked it up. Can you tell I did that?

I also found the  Ball Canning site that has  useful canning ratios under the heading fresh tools. All in all the project was a huge success and since the garden is still  producing tomatoes at a furious rate, I'm hoping to wrestle the recipe for the pineapple salsa from my sister, Carol. She gave me a jar last Christmas that I still remember, ummm, ummm, ummmm! but she's being fairly secretive about her recipe.