Canning — Everybody’s Learning How
Somehow the subject of canning is everywhere on the interenets, and it’s spawned a bastardized version of “Surfin Safari” inside my head. You’ve got a lot of time to think of things like this while waiting for water to boil.
On the home front — I put up a couple of jars of marinated eggplant last night. Our local truck farm had these gorgeous mottled purple eggplants, and since the eggplants in my garden are not going to win the annual race with frost, I snapped up a bunch. I bought that big Silver Spoon cookbook when it was all the rage a couple of years ago, adn I haven’t used it much — but turns out, it’s a great reference when you’ve got a single ingredient and you’re looking for something to do with it. Of course, I can’t seem to folllow a recipe all the way through to save my life, so I tossed the eggplant slices in olive oil and baked them instead of frying, and I left the capers out of the marinade but I kept the mint, and garlic, and hot peppers. When the eggplant slices had turned golden, I tossed them in the marinade, then packed them into two half-pint jars that I’d sterilized because I’ve been canning so much lately that the idea of putting food in an unsterilized jar has become an anathema. I topped off the jars with more olive oil, let them sit out all night to meld the flavors, and stuck them in the fridge. The garlic is a little dodgy since apparently garlic in olive oil can create a good medium for the botulism toxin, so I might freeze one of the jars if it doesn’t look like they’re getting eaten right away. But I’m thinking marinated eggplant on toast with a little cheese melted on top might just make an awfully yummy lunch one of these days …
As for canning across the internets — here are some links:
- Bonnie’s making pickles and KimChee over at Ethicurean:
- Teresa is salting beans and making sauerkraut at Down on the Farm
- The Nolls in Oregon chronicle over 30 years of canning online
- Fellow Montana writer, Jennifer Savage writes at Culinate about the compulsion to put up food, even when it’s hot, and you’re very pregnant. The payoff was feeding her new baby food she knew …
- Brendon in Davis, California walks through one of my favorite farmer’s markets in the world, and finds himself the proud owner of 25 pounds of tomatoes. His adventure in canning is here:
2 thoughts on “Canning — Everybody’s Learning How”
C, i am soooo sorry to say this, because the eggplant sounds just yummy, but unless you put a fair amount of acid into that eggplant, that mixture is just not going to be safe to keep. garlic in olive oil is a reliable setting for production of botulinum toxin, which is not a thing you want to be consuming. if you made the mixture and refrigerated or froze it quickly, you could be OK for a while (
Yeah, I know — that’s why I mentioned it in the first place. I’ve got one jar in the fridge, and one in the freezer and I’m really not planning on long-term preservation (they’re too yummy to keep around, actually). But I didn’t want anyone out there in the internet-o-sphere to miss on the garlic + oil = botulism problem …
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