Fall is coming--and that means canning season is too!

Last year hubby and I tried our hand at canning. We tried making our own salsa and we made some spicy dill beans. I come from a long line of canners and I always loved having homemade pickles, jams and other preserves to eat throughout the year that we had made ourselves. I had never attempted to do any canning on my own though until last year, and it was definitely an adventure! It's a lot of work--but it's totally worth it!

 

This year I think we're going to make some more spicy dill beans (which we and guests have devoured all year long!), and we would like to try dill pickles as well as some elderberry jam this time.

Our salsa which looked delicious while being prepared and cooking, ended up tasting pretty terrible. It's really sweet and not spicy at all, so I think we'll pass on that one this time around. Maybe we'll attempt it again next year after consulting with the canning elders on what we might have done wrong!

 

 



The final products however looked pretty awesome, and let's face it, we consumed all of the spicy dill beans AGES ago. My sister tries to steal a jar whenever she can! It's sad really. I even gave her one for Christmas. The chili pepper in the dill beans not only adds lots of flavour, it provides a nice colour punch too!

I've never made Jam before, but I'm excited to give it a try! Elderberries are a particular favourite of mine, and appear to be an Ontario thing since many friends from other places have no idea what they are... what they are is DELICOUS! We're hoping to go berry picking this weekend, and in the meantime we need to re-evaluate our canning supplies to figure out what we need to pick up before then.

We need to get this skill down so that we can pass on the wisdom of canning to the boy-o, because lets face it, not much beats eating your own jam made from fresh fruit in the middle of winter!