Vanderbrew

Amber and I spent a good part of the weekend canning. On Saturday morning we drove out to a local area with lots of farms, farm stands and “u pick” orchards. We bought 17 pounds of apricots for $5. They were on a bargain table, with a lot of small fruit and some bruised and damaged ones, but they were perfect for making jam. We also picked up 8 pickling cucumbers and some bell peppers to make relish.

Yesterday afternoon was spent on apricot jam and this afternoon was relish. Both came out well and we’re quite pleased with the results.

Now, about the title… It’s been really hot here. Upper nineties both days and the last thing either of us want to be doing is boiling water for canning inside - fortunately, we didn’t have to. See, we also brew beer and part of brewing beer is getting 5 gallons of water to boil. This is not something that you want to be doing on your dinky (Dy, this doesn’t include you) house range. It can easily take an hour to get that much liquid boiling so we bought an outdoor burner a few months ago. This baby puts out 55,000 BTU’s, can boil 5 gallons of water in 20 minutes and is perfect for outdoor use. We get to stay inside our air conditioned condo and only dart outside to set jars out for sterilizing or processing or bring them in for filling or cooling. A very nice way to do it.

Oh, and there’s a few pictures.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 9th, 2006 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Cooking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.