Lately, I start my Saturdays with canning and bread baking.

I used to avoid these activities because I thought they would take too much time. I’d been in the habit of making easy, tasty recipes that required little effort or planning. Somehow i’d forgotten that in many cases, the harder you work, the more satisfying the finished product is (a concept that applies to more than cooking). After a few weeks of canning, i’ve grown increasingly attached to my small collection of jams and preserves- so much so that I get a little sad when my husband polishes off a jar.


Here’s how my current canning schedule works: On Thursdays, I buy fruit that looks good. If i’m not going to can in the next few days, I prep and freeze it. I pick a recipe from my growing pile of canning books and go to the store for supplementary ingredients (jars, lemons, etc). On Saturday morning, I wake up, eat breakfast, do some small batch canning, then make bread. While the bread is rising and baking, I clean up the apartment. When the bread’s done, I keep one loaf for eating and freeze the other. It’s really satisfying. Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day, and it seems like a luxury to have a selection of homemade breads and jams to choose from. Lately i’ve been eating yogurt mixed with peach-vanilla preserves, with toasted almonds on top.

This recipe for rhubarb, strawberry & cherry preserves is my favorite so far. It’s not too sweet and the fruit doesn’t completely disintegrate. The texture was perfect: juicy and just set enough to not run off your toast. I’m hoping to make it again, but I fear our strawberry season is pretty much over
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Last Thursday I visited the Homegrown Alabama farmers market. Quite fortuitously, they had a good selection of strawberries and early season peaches- two fruits i’d been looking for since receiving my copy of Sarabeth’s Bakery: From my Hands to Yours, which includes a recipe for her Strawberry Peach spreadable fruit. I canned about six half-pints, and we’ve eaten our way through one of them (plus two sticks of salted Irish butter) in less than a week. They are excellent on the above-pictured French sandwich bread from the Continental Bakery and equally good on rosemary bread.

This was my first experience canning with proper equipment, and it was significantly less stressful than my previous attempts. The most onerous steps were prepping the fruit and waiting for the water to boil for jar sterilizing and processing. I’m beginning to think that what intimidates me about canning is not food safety, but cost. With baking, it’s easy to add things like butter and sugar to my weekly grocery list and not notice how they’re impacting my budget. I also have equipment i’ve collected over the past decade. Canning has lots of up-front costs. It also requires storage space for both the equipment and the finished product.

I’ve started reading Food in Jars, which may be my new favorite blog. It has extremely helpful tips and equipment reviews, and lots of step by step photos of how to do all these things. I’m not sure I will ever be that prolific a canner- but i’d like to at least learn enough to be creative and produce the flavors/textures I enjoy. This recipe was fairly straightforward, though my cooking time was much longer (I think I had the heat too low).
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