My husband and I are very intentional about making sure our kids know where their food comes from. Our outside freezer is full of different meats that Tripp has hunted and processed himself in our kitchen. He provides for his family in the most basic way and I love that about him. I help him out with the processing and freezing, but I long to provide for my family in a different way.
As of today we have nearly 30 pounds of squash and zucchini in the freezer, over halfway to my initial goal of 50 pounds. There's a lot more to come and we'll run out of freezer space well before picking season is over. I needed to learn how to properly can and pickle fresh veggies so the rest of our vegetables in the garden don't go to waste.
I made pepper sauce once from fresh jalapeños, but I made it way too hot and it nearly put my grandmother in cardiac arrest. I made dill pickles that same year from a packet I found at the grocery store. They turned out alright. I liked them--not the best, not the worst, but my husband wasn't a fan at all. I'm still eating them little by little but to be honest with you, I'll be glad when they're gone.
Besides the fact that my pickles and peppers were just meh, I was totally new at the waterbath canning process and didn't do everything exactly the way it should have been done. I'm kind of an "eh, that's good enough" person when it comes to anything that takes real effort, so it's no surprise at all when I try something and just get average results. It's a rotten habit I'm working on breaking. I owe it to myself to do better.
Tripp's grandmother, Alice, is full to the brim with the knowledge and wisdom I hope to have one day. She's the perfect mentor for projects like this because unlike myself, she does things correctly, the way her mother taught her years ago. If there's a step she's unsure of or something doesn't quite seem right, she consults her mentor, Lavira. See a pattern here? These skills are passed down from person to person over generations. I was never going to properly learn to can from simply googling it. I needed a real life teacher just like our mothers and grandmothers did before us--before there was such a thing as the internet.
That's why, when a coworker of Tripp's sent him home with a cooler full of green tomatoes, I knew this was the exact learning experience I had been waiting for. I immediately called Granny Alice and asked her to teach me how to make green tomato pickles. Of course she agreed.
So a few days later, I drove out to her house with green tomatoes, canning jars, and a bag full of ingredients. The recipe we followed was from the Ball Canning Book, and I will put a picture of it here, but I am not going to walk you through the entire process. I'll cover the high points, but I never intended for this to be a how-to blog. I'm just here to learn new things and bring you along with me. I will not be an expert after one successful canning experience. Or two, or three.
After I washed the jars (by hand, of course) and Alice placed them in a giant pot of hot water to keep warm, I washed, cored, and quartered the tomatoes. We mixed the brine and set it to boil, then we filled the jars. First the tomatoes, then a bay leaf, sprig of dill, and a clove of garlic, then finally the brine. I took zero pictures of this process because I was completely unaware that I would start a blog the following week. Plus, I was fully immersed in Granny Alice's stories of when she and her mother used to do this exact thing. She also shared little tips and tricks that aren't in the recipe books. "You do know that you don't eat the bay leaf, right?" I did not.
We talked and laughed until we had seven jars of green tomato pickles in the waterbath. By this time it was getting late and my boys were getting tired. (Tripp was playing with them around the farm while his grandmother and I were busy.) Alice told me to go ahead home, and that she would take the pickles out of the bath and would call me and let me know that they all sealed. They would be too hot to take home that night anyway. I thanked her, cleaned up the supplies we were finished with and went home with my family.
The next morning I got a call from a very excited Granny Alice. "All of your pickles sealed and they look great!" We both yayed over the phone and she invited me to a canning class this summer taught by Lavira, her mentor I mentioned earlier. I'm fairly certain I'll be the youngest one there by a few decades, but what an opportunity! Years from now when my grandchildren call and ask me to teach them to make tomato pickles, I'll have the knowledge and experience to show them.
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