Maintaining My Amateur Status

Despite the post of my Mid-Winter’s Lament a few weeks back, I didn’t until just this week really understand just how much of prior years’ canning we’d been using. Sure, the jars were piling up, but since I’m not one of those canning types who catalogs and indexes my output – which is strange, considering how much of a control freak I am in nearly every other aspect of my life – I don’t have any kind of metric or tracking tool against which to check our usage. If I don’t know that I made, say, 40 quarts of applesauce last fall and I don’t know that I just opened number 39, I have no way of knowing that I’d better slow down with the counting on having more around. Clearly, I’ve got what we business-minded types call a process gap, one that is only just now making itself known.


I opened the last jar of tomatillo salsa last night and nearly forewent adorning the dinner burritos because, hey, it was the last jar and you can’t just use that on anything. The aforementioned applesauce is actually long gone and the peaches are not far behind. For plain old tomatoes, I’m down to a few pints which, given the cold winter’s impact on domestic tomato production, I am treating as part of my 401(k). Blackberries? History. Brandied apples? No more. Preserved lemons? The way of the Dodo. Spiced honey? Holiday gifting took care of that one. I still have plain cherries, raspberry jam and one jar of tomato salsa. There’s also a jar of apple butter (which I don’t even like and cannot remember what possessed me to make it), a quarter pint of pickled jalapenos and a few more half-pints of pickled mushrooms. That’s it, that’s all she wrote after years and years of canning activity.

Even if I don’t keep records of pantry inputs and outputs, it’s not hard to understand what happened. Life and stuff, that’s what happened. Leaving aside blights and weather and the price of whatnot, my rate of canning slowed as the children grew and developed lives of their own at the same time as my professional life ramped up a bit. Since I am disinclined to use my small amounts of leisure grocery shopping for basics (shopping for party food or stuff to put into jars is completely different, although I don’t do much of either for other reasons), well, here we are.

Since we have, quite literally, been dining on past years’ productivity and industriousness, if I am ever again to enjoy meal-related leisure I need to get back to work, canning-wise. True planning is difficult to do this far in advance because we never know how weather, bugs and diseases will affect crop production. It's all well and good to commit oneself to 50 pints of peach ketchup but no bets should be made until the crop is in hand, so to speak.

It wouldn't do at all to set your heart on the peaches only to find out that, this year, you're more gifted in the hot pepper area. Better instead to focus on ideas - maybe you could use more jam or sandwich enhancers or fruits suitable for side dishes. Focusing on concepts allows you to bop and weave with your canning - you'll get your jam, but maybe it'll be blackberry instead of strawberry. Pickles might end up as green cherry tomatoes rather than hamburger dills. See what I mean? Bop and weave right around whatever the garden, the weather or your mood throws at the affair. For my part, I'm focusing on finished items rather than ingredients - salsas over plain tomatoes, brandied fruits over plain berries, for example, things I can use more or less as-is without further massaging after the jar is open.

We'll see. It's clear that I need to do something in the way of planning and this is pretty much as far as I'm willing to go. I don't know what I'll put on the pantry shelves this year, but I do know it'll be something great.