March 23rd - “Housekeeping!”

24/03/2009 by Brigid.

You can tell John is away. I am eating my dinner while typing this, while all around lies the debris from today’s unfinished projects and, on the table in front of me, is a large steel pressure canner, just arrived by mail order from the US, and still in its box.  There is just about room for a place mat and cheese board.

I’m having soup again. It is my own fault. Whenever I make minestrone, I always make too much, and John and I end up eating it for days. This time, with John not here to eat his share, it might, feasibly, not get finished. The recipe calls for a huge quantity of neatly diced vegetables, as well as bacon, chickpeas and tomatoes. Though I say so myself, it’s not a bad soup. Quite tasty, actually. But there is something rather off-putting about the colour of this week’s offering. The addition of red, instead of green, cabbage, initially gave the broth an unusually rich brown colour. Against the tomatoey background, the contrasting colours of the chickpeas, red cabbage, leek, carrot and courgette, looked surprisingly appetising. But, after a day or so, the purple dye from the cabbage started to leech into the broth, and most of the vegetables are now a uniform grey purple colour, the sort you expect to see when you wash your undies on the wrong cycle.

The canner is for cat food. Having read one too many horror stories about what goes into commercial pet food, I now prepare fresh meat for our two little carnivores. The trouble is, being away for several weeks this summer, one cannot expect the good folk at the cattery to spend hours chopping up chicken carcasses. Dry food is, well …. dry. And the only time I ever tried them on tinned food, they turned their spoilt little noses up. So, one day, looking at all the bottled pâtés and cassoulets on the supermarket shelves, I hit upon the solution. Home canning.

The French are mad for home bottled fruit and veg and bits of duck and goose preserved in fat but, otherwise, don’t go in much for ‘canned’ meat. In fact, I couldn’t find out very much about home canning at all from European sources. You cannot even buy domestic pressure canners this side of the Atlantic. But search the Internet and you will find a plethora of advice from the backwoods of America, where well-fed, round-faced, jolly-looking women, regularly can anything from squirrel to venison!

Did I say the canner was big? At 23 quarts, it is enormous. The box says I can process 7 quart jars, 20 pint jars or 24 half-pint jars. I can only imagine what the cattery owner will say, when I turn up with a box full of bottled cat food and instructions to keep the jars. Still, cats aside, I am reading the instruction and recipe book, and getting quite excited about the prospect of filling the shelves of our cave with home made stews and pâtés. Perfect for those occasions when my own backwoodsman unexpectedly brings home a posse of hungry, lumberjack-shirt wearing, mates for dinner.

Posted in Uncategorised | Print | No Comments »