Guest Blogger Rebekah Denn Joins the Canvolution
Rebekah Denn wakes up thinking about breakfast and goes to bed remembering dinner. She is the winner of two James Beard Awards for food writing, and covers food and books for various publications. She is the former food editor of the former Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper, and blogs at EatAllAboutIt.com. We are excited to have her guest blogging on Al Dente today!
My husband’s Midwestern cousins are German Baptists; similar in some ways to the Amish. They were the first to ever ask me if I canned our garden’s excess tomatoes, zucchinis, and berries. It was as shockingly old-fashioned a question then, in the 1990s, as if they’d expected me to slaughter my own cows.
So how is it, in as major a city as Seattle, it seems everyone I know is now either pickling and jamming or hoping to learn? Dozens of food lovers raised their hands when invited to hold canning parties the weekend of August 29, and to push for similar parties in a nationwide Can-A-Rama called Canning Across America. In a new survey by Allrecipes.com, 36 percent of respondents who do home canning said they’re doing more this year than last year. Even some casual chit-chat on Twitter last week led to a group of us showing up at Kathy Casey Studios, hairnets at the ready, for an impromptu acolyte party involving giant bubbling pots of apricot chutney. (Casey herself has joined the Canvolution; she’s teaching a formal class August 20 along the same lines as our impromptu one.)
I’ve already gone through Nick Sandler and Johnny Acton’s Preserved for jam ideas; now Christine Ferber’s Mes Confitures is on my kitchen table for advanced study, just as soon as I finish my sneak refresher of Canning & Preserving For Dummies. Because, really, a dummy is what I feel like. All this catching up, when I could have been enjoying my own apricot jam for years if I’d only asked my cousins the same thing I’m asking my Canvolution compatriots: “Will you share your recipe? Will you show me how?”
Fran on August 15, 2009 at 12:00 PM
Has caning changed over the years? I used to watch my mother-in-law can green beans, and it always looked like she was cooking the healthy goodness out of them first.