Canning

[midnight]

I know it isn't the season, but I know nothing about canning so I thought I should start studying up now. Any advice and good references would be very helpful.

[SeeAPenny]

Do you have a canner? I recommend water bath canning for beginners. Water bath canners can be found at garage sales and thrift stores, so keep an eye out....

Foods that can be safely canned in a water bath canner are ones with high acidity, such as tomatoes, pickles, and fruit. Salsa and applesauce are good beginner recipes. Be sure to follow canning instructions and recipes carefully -- no shortcuts! But really, overall, canning is a very safe, and satisfying, activity....

There are a lot of canning resources out there. I particularly like 'Ball's Blue Book of Canning' : http://www.paulnoll.com/Oregon/Canni...ning-book.html . A good website is this one: http://www.homecanning.com/ . You can find tons of canning info online. In any event, while there may seem to be a lot of (intimidating) steps to canning at first -- it really is a fairly straight forward procedure, that gets easier with practice. I promise. And what a lot of satisfaction it brings to stock your pantry with your own home-canned goodies....!