Of course sometimes we will go through that many jars of canned food in a single week. (Remarkable, isn’t it? Almost as if we had seven children.) At that rate the pantry can fill up pretty fast with washed and empty jars. We tranfer the empty jars back down to the root cellar, but with hundreds of jars to store, that fills up too. So Jess likes to keep the jars circulating. And canned chicken and canned beans are a great first step for a hot supper, too.

Since beans start out hard and chicken starts out raw, you have to pressure can them for a certain amount of time to make sure they’re safe. Jess has the Ball canning book that imparts all those secrets. I know that if you don’t can meat correctly you can get salmonella or other nasties; but as far as I can tell none of us has died yet from eating home-canned meat.

You’ll note the jars of chicken appear about half full. They start out full; when she’s canning, she slices the chicken breasts into strips the long way and packs ‘em in. But they cook down to the quantity shown here. And since we don’t eat a ton of meat, one jar half-full of cooked chicken is plenty for a big supper for all of us, plus the portion I’ll tote to work next day for lunch.

We’ll have to make do with our patchy snow and mud. In the mean time, not to rub it in or anything, we’re grateful to have a root cellar.

I was at the tax man’s the other day and saw his copy of the Wall Street Journal. The front-page, above-the-fold picture was of a couple of folks in a barren supermarket, picking up what they could get of what was left. It was just a few forlorn lemons, as I recall. I hear that back east the weather is so bad, people are burning all their books by Al Gore to keep warm.

In the meantime, we have our own grocery store at home.

This is an old picture of our root cellar. Now it’s so crammed with supplies that we have step up on the shelves and pick our way back like spelunkers to get to the dishwashing soap, say, or the condensed milk, which are on the back shelves. My orders are to go pick up 25 5-gallon buckets next week to store more of the staples up and out of the way. Okay.

It’s a nice feeling. Once our propane tank is refilled, we should have all we need to survive for up to four months should we be cut off from the outside world. Power, hot water, food, popcorn, and everything. Provided nothing breaks that I can’t fix, and my daughters learn to take shorter showers.

Remember the giganto-pumpkin that was hogging up the mud room floor? Jessica attacked it the other day. She sliced it into chunks as big as her hand, boiled the chunks (in three separate pots), skinned ‘em, and gave them to her trusty assistant (me) to mush ‘em up. I did so, because most of the time I can operate the food processor without injuring myself. Then I dumped them into gallon freezer bags. It filled up five of them, and we threw them into our overflowing freezers.

Five gallons! Ah ah ah. (Remember the Count on Sesame Street? That’s how he laughed.) Five! Ah ah ah. That’s a lot of pumpkin pie. And pumpkin cookies, and pumpkin muffins, and I don’t know what all she puts it in. Maybe pumpkin foie gras. She’s quite a cook.

And it’s quite a pumpkin to give us five gallons o’pumpkin mush. Next year we’ll put manure on our own pumpkin plants and hopefully get a pumpkin larger than a softball.

Well, there it is. When Jess was putting this year’s cider into the root cellar, she had me bring up these two jars—the last of last year’s cider stash. It’s kind of funny that our quantity of cider from last year lined up so tidily with what we produced this year, but there you are. I’m glad we didn’t run out of cider before this year’s apples were ready.

You can see from these bottles, which have sat on a shelf in the dark for a year, where the store-bought apple juice gets its look. The particulates have settled to the bottom of these jars, and what remains is probably what Tree Top and the rest of them bottle up and sell to you, O consumer, with the probable addition of 17 strange chemicals that neither you nor they nor anybody but some now-retired chemist in Jersey City knows exactly what they were for. Blech. The first time I tasted homemade cider is the last time I will ever give a second glance at the glop in the stores. The taste is out of this world. The distance between that and what is sold commercially is like the distance between a store-bought tomato and one you grew in your own soil. You look at the red things in the stores and think, “Those are tomatoes?” Homemade cider is so sharp and sweet that you never want to drink anything else.

When we serve cider we shake up the jars, restoring the original cloudy look. It’s entirely possible that those particulates are not just innocent apple pulp, but tiny bits of peel, core, seeds, and yes, even worms. The whole shebang is boiled for 15 minutes in canning, so I’m not worried about germs. (Most of our apples are clean off the tree, but I won’t swear they’re antiseptic.) And who knows, all that good honest gunk is probably what makes it taste so good. I’d rather drink cold tangy cider from apples we picked ourselves than unpronounceable chemicals from a lab in Jersey City.

Anyhoo, here’s a batch of apple cider processing on the wood stove. Jess has two pressure canners and you can’t fit both of them on the stove if you’re also trying to heat up the next batch o’cider. So when Jess was gone one evening I put the cider-heating pot on the wood stove. It worked brilliantly until I shifted the pot and the cider splashed out onto the hot metal, filling our home with the lovely aroma of burning apple juice. And it left baked-on spill marks on the metal which are still there, yuck.

Jess was smarter. She put the canner on the stove, instead of the pot o’cider. The canner has a sealed lid and only contains water, which don’t stink if it’s spilled. The canner starts boiling quicker than it does on the stove. So we’ll be doing this next year. If I can get the charred cider off before then.

It’s a homesteading blog, so you knew that come fall, a lot of the posts would be about canning. And you were right! So last week it was pears, and here they are fresh from the orchard. (We’ve already eaten the plums, or turned them into canned plummy-garlicky sauce we eat with egg rolls). Here’s the big secret Jess learned last week:

You don’t have to peel pears to can ‘em.

Did you feel the ground move under your feet? Is your worldview altered? Is it an entirely new view on life? No? Then you’ve never spent a whole day peeling pear after pear in order to can them. All you do is blanch them for 50 seconds or so, and the skins slide right off. No pears were peeled in the making of this photograph. Jess is excited about this since it cuts down on the amount of time required to can pears (they already have to process for 35 minutes per batch). She has one more box of them to can today, and then it’s on to applesauce again.

You’ll also note the eclectic nature of our pear-jar collection. We are inveterate cheapskates and we need lots of canning jars; so if people offer us jars we take ‘em. It’s canning jars; who cares what they look like, as long as they do their job? Come to think of it, that applies to a lot of things in life.

Canning’s a lot of work now, but on a cold winter’s night there’s nothing better than hot soup, biscuits slathered with butter, and cold canned pears from the root cellar.

So we took the kids out behind the Church on Friday and picked apples. The branches were loaded down and the neighbor said they were ripe, but I’m having my doubts. Anyway, Katie, Abby and (temporarily) Natalie got up in the tree and threw apples down (not at the rest of us, of course); Jess went up on the ladder; Dad shook branches to bring fruit raining down; Natalie chewed apples at random she found in the grass; and Jacob sat in his car seat and cried. (Emma and Becca are still at their grandparents’ house in Utah.)

This is the result: about 200 pounds of partially ripe apples. On Saturday Jessica got up and started apple saucing (she prefers to work alone in the kitchen, so I went outside and struggled with the wood shed roof again). At the end of the day she had 19 quarts of apple sauce done. She still has the majority of apples to process.

She’s headed into the big city today to make a Costco run and pick the kids up at the airport. She’s given me notice that if she sees fruit stands offering something she wants to can, she’ll be stopping. The canning season has begun!