Kind of exactly the opposite of roaming

More like very tightly gripping the very essence of home and this moment of summer, grinding it all up, boiling the hell out of it, and sealing it in a jar to enjoy next winter. Or next Tuesday, as the case may be. Ni modo. The moral of the story is: We took up canning, and it's awesome.

Two weeks ago when I went home to meet the babies, I helped my aunt (the one who has a garden measuring in acres and can feed 200+ people with no problem) can salsa and pickles. I also snapped a five gallon bucket of beans - the big ones for garlic-pickled beans (yum!) and the small ones for canning. Lessons:

1. My aunt is goddess-like in the food realm and makes the best refrigerator pickles EVER.
2. The canning process itself is very easy. Basically, you just boil some jars of food.
3. Getting food ready to put in the jars is a whole lotta work and a ginormous pain in the ass.

I came back on a mission, and the Universe supported me. Jars at Goodwill for 15 and 25 cents apiece. A tomato U-pick scheduled at our CSA farm for this week. And the clincher: while waiting for my laundry to dry one morning last week, I gaze across the mounds of stuff in the basement and, alas, in the distance I see a ray of light shining down upon my neighbor's canning kettle ripe for the borrowing. Clearly, this was meant to be.

And so Saturday morning found Wintergypsy and I foraging tomatoes, hot peppers, a buttload of basil, tomatillos, and a stray eggplant and squash or two from our CSA farm and the quickly overgrowing garden from the program I volunteered at this summer. Lucia foraged from her and a friend's backyard and the farmers' market.

This was my starting supply o' produce. Ridiculous.

Sunday morning, we each slaved over our respective stoves. I made tomato salsa, green tomatillo salsa, and spaghetti sauce. This took me about four hours of chopping and boiling. Lucia make spaghetti sauce and cherry tomato salsa. Wintergypsy made tomato salsa, spaghetti sauce, and some pesto (for eating/freezing, not canning). Spaghetti sauce takes FOREVER to cook down.

We then gathered at my house to encase the food in jars. In typical Lucia fashion, there was none of this halfway, try-it-out, used, borrowed b.s. for her. Oh, no, she took the Farm & Fleet canning section by storm and bought a canning kettle, pressure canner, and sundry jars, lids and canning tools. The lil' magnet jobby-do for picking the lids out of the boiling water was the cutest.

We sanitized (well, mostly) jars and lids, heated our food back up, and popped several batches in the canner. 15-20 minutes for salsas, 30-35 minutes for spaghetti sauce. With our expected organizational glitches in the timing of the various heatings and fillings and sanitizing, particularly the "sanitize" cycle on my dishwasher, this took us nearly 4 hours.

After the ladies left, I proceeded to make a buttload of pesto. The limiting reagent turned out to be the cheese.
2-1/2 hours later - a full 11 hours after I started cooking - I had a bowl full of green gold. And that was without the several hours of work the ladies saved me earlier by picking all my basil off the plants for me. Yeesh.

It may not look like much, but the final results of all our efforts looked like a masterpiece to me:

And my reward meal of sweet cherry tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and pesto, which was so summerly sublime I almost cried.

Lucia is making the leap from water bath canning into pressure canning this weekend. The adventure continues ...