Sunday morning began early. Like 5 a.m. early.
Two kitchens on the Johnson Funny Farm were tackling a mission to prepare two foods each and swap some goods, like an old-fashioned cookie swap – – only different. We started with fruits ~ vegetables will come later.
My sister-in-law and I both canned cinnamon spiced apples and she canned apple butter using apples we’d purchased at Jaemor Farms in Alto, Georgia on her birthday outing on Saturday after our stroll through Gibbs Gardens. She also canned blueberries. I canned peach marmalade using peaches also purchased at Jaemor Farms and also canned fig marmalade. I would have ordinarily used peaches from Gregg Farms, our local orchard two miles from our home, but over 90 percent of Georgia’s peach crop was lost this year due to weather, and Gregg’s lost every one of their peaches.
The figs, though, were grown forty feet from our house on a tree I planted in 2009, purchased for $3.00 on a clearance rack at Home Depot. We have loved on this tree for a decade and a half. Some years we’ve made fig preserves, but other years we’ve let the black swallowtails and monarchs feast on the fermenting figs without the threat of our picking. One year, a good friend came to pick some for a prized fig cake she was baking from the Barefoot Contessa cookbook, and she brought us one of her cakes as well. The memories of figs are alive and well from this tree and from the trees of my mother and grandmothers as we made strawberry figs together with my children for so many years.
And Jesus himself liked figs. (21st Chapter of Matthew)
So our day of canning started with peeling, slicing, chopping, blending, and dicing that led to boiling, stirring, simmering, scooping, sealing, cooling, and labeling.
Canning was a great way to relax and fill our homes with the aromas of the love language of cooking, but I’m still trying my best to make the math work. I remained in the black on the figs I grew if I didn’t factor in the cost of the jars and lids (repeated jar uses would lessen that cost each time). With the cost of the peaches, I went into the red compared to what was on the shelf at Jaemor, already canned. Ounce for ounce, I paid more to do the canning – and I didn’t count the time or the electricity, or the extra air conditioning in the already hot kitchen. I would need to grow my own peaches or buy the bruised or overripe fruits and can them that day to make the cost analysis work compared to what I could buy already in jars canned by a professional who is far more skilled than I am. But I realize it is all about the fun and the preservation of foods for those winter storms when we need to hunker down and stay home by the fire and recall the warmth of summer fruits and memories in the kitchen to soothe our souls.
(I still think free-range chickens are the best investment for self-sustaining farm, if we could keep the hawks away).
If you have an amazing recipe for canning – or tips to keep it more affordable – please share in the comments below. I’d love some great instant pot and crock pot canning recipes. I don’t think I’m a good candidate for a pressure cooker. I might really do some damage with that.
Common Threads 