Bread and butter pickles for mom

You'll need:

This is what a 1/2 bushel of mini-cucumbers looks like when you haul it home from the Farmers' Market and put them in the sink to wash. I was feeling ambitious. The market tends to do that to me at this time of year.

• 24 cups thinly sliced cucumbers

• 5 medium (think baseball-sized) white onions

• 1/3 cup kosher salt

• 3 3/4 cups white vinegar

• 2 cups white sugar

• 3 T whole mustard seed

• 1 1/2 T whole celery seed

• 1  t ground turmeric

• 11 pint (500 ml) Mason jars

• 11 snap lids and rings

Directions for cooking and canning:

1. Rinse the cucumbers well. Trim the ends. 

2. Set up your entertainment system. 24 cups will take a while. I'm finally watching Gilmore Girls about a decade after it left the air. Yay, Netflix.

3. Slice the cucumbers thinly. I used the mandoline (or mangler as it's known in our house because it tends to bite!) set at 1/16". 

4. Layer the cucumbers in a strainer, sprinkling salt between layers.  Set the strainer inside a larger pot or bowl to catch the drips and set it aside to drain for at least 3 hours. I left it overnight in the fridge.

5. Thinly slice the onions. Maybe they were supposed to be salted and drained as well? I didn't do that. Everything was fine. 
6. Wash your Mason jars in hot soapy water. Rinse well.
7. Fill your canning pot halfway-ish with water and put it on to heat. Put 6 of your jars in there to heat up. While you don't necessarily need to pre-sterilize, you'll be packing the jars with hot stuff, so it's important for the jars to be hot as well. 

8. Put the vinegar, sugar, spices, and any remaining salt into a large pot. Bring it to a boil, giving it a stir to help dissolve the sugar. 
9. Shake the cucumbers in the strainer to drip off as much of the liquid as you can, but don't rinse off the salt. Add alternating handfuls of cucumbers and onions to the hot pickle brine. 
10. Stir everything together thoroughly and bring it back up to a gentle boil.
11. Scoop a small amount of water from the canner into a small pot and put your snap lids in there to heat.
12. Retrieve your hot jars from the boiling water and quickly ladle the hot pickle mixture into hot jars, using a wide mouth funnel. Leave about an inch of headspace.
13. "Bubble" each jar with a skewer or chopstick to release any trapped air. Wipe each rim with a clean damp paper towel. Place a heated snap lid down and screw the ring on finger tip tight. 
14. Put the jars into your water bath canner. Make sure there is at least an inch of water above the top of your jars. Put the pot lid on and return to the boil for 15 minutes. Don't start your timer until the water is boiling. 
15. Remove jars from the canner (or let them sit in the canner until everything calms down). Put the remaining 5 jars into the canner to heat up and repeat the process. 

There you go! Eleven pints, ready to eat... after at least 6 weeks of waiting for them to flavourify in the jars.  

Runny, yummy, oh so sweet strawberry jam!

It's just not June without fresh local strawberries. (Okay, so technically, it hasn't been June for five weeks or so. I thought I lost these pictures when my BlackBerry died in a big way. As it turns out, I had already saved them to my laptop. Look at me go, more organized than I even know.)

At any rate, it was June, the strawberries were glorious, so I got my jam on. And there's even photographic evidence!

You'll need:

• 6 cups crushed strawberries (I think it was about 5 of those green plastic baskets)

• 2 cups white sugar 

• Juice of 1 lemon and 2 limes (~4 T combined)

• 1 pkg (57 g box) pectin

• 6 half-pint (250 ml) Mason jars 

• 6 snap lids and rings

Directions for cooking and canning:

1. Wash your Mason jars in hot soapy water. Rinse well.

2. Fill your canning pot halfway-ish with water and put it on to heat. Put your jars in there to get all sterilized and hygienic while you do the rest.

3. Wash, hull and crush strawberries, one layer at a time, until you have 6 cups worth.

4. Combine your strawberries your strawberries and lemon-lime juice in your cooking pot. As it heats, add the pectin and stir it in well until dissolved. 

5. Over high heat, bring mixture to a full rolling boil. Add the sugar. You might want more than 2 cups; taste and add more if you wish. The recipe called for a ridiculous SEVEN! cups of sugar, but whoa.  

6. Stirring constantly, return mixture to full rolling boil that doesn't calm down even when you stir it.

7. Boil hard 1 minute, stirring constantly.

8. Remove from heat. Skim off foam. My kids love the foam. For them, it's a treat in the order of licking the icing off the beaters.

9. Rescue your jars from the boiling water. Scoop a small amount of water into a small pot and put your snap lids in there to heat. 

10. Quickly ladle hot jam into hot jars, using a wide mouth funnel. Leave 0.5 cm headspace.

11. "Bubble" each jar with a skewer or chopstick to release any trapped air. Wipe each rim with a clean damp paper towel. Place the snap lid down and screw the ring on finger tip tight. 

12. Put the jars into your water bath canner. Make sure there is at least an inch of water above the top of your jars. Put the pot lid on and return to the boil for 10 minutes. Don't start your timer until the water is boiling. 

13. Remove jars from the canner (or let them sit in the canner until everything calms down).

14. Stack artistically and try not to sprain your arm while you pat yourself on the back. 

Gorgeous! I have to admit the jam is a little wee bit runny. I'm wondering if the pectin actually needed that crazy about of sugar to fully thicken. I dunno. I don't usually buy that kind but they didn't have any of the low-sugar kind in the store. Bright side is that a couple teaspoonsfull are unlikely to send anyone into a sugar coma.