How It All Started

An Intro to Urban Can-Girl

There is no tin foil in my house (OK, a roll of Reynold’s is at the bottom of the pantry – but that is technically aluminum). The truth is you don’t have to be paranoid to have evaluated your food supply and storage situation at least once over the last 2+ years.

I spent a long time living in a center city condo with a 56 square foot kitchen. Taking a “just in time” inventory approach to food, I filled the fridge each weekend with necessities for the coming week, kept ice and some sad leftovers in the freezer, and tucked a few cans and boxes in the corners of cabinets. I tried small-batch canning of jams from farmer’s market fruit years ago, but while I loved the results, I hated making storage space for the necessary equipment the other 9 months a year. So, I eventually gave it up and re-homed my supplies with a grateful friend.

Fast forward to last Spring. Having relocated to a smaller city, but now having a significantly larger kitchen, I signed up for both a fruit and a vegetable CSA. (Community Supported Agriculture – you pay the farmer a flat fee to help through planting and growing season, and get produce in return all harvest season.) Canning seemed like an ideal way to preserve some of the bounty I was about to receive.

After my first batch of Strawberry Jam (from America’s Test Kitchen Foolproof Preserving ), I was hooked. Today, six months, a dozen-plus books, scores of YouTube videos, 130 pounds of tomatoes, and 214 Ball mason jars later, I thought it was time to look back on my experience. I will be reviewing the books I bought and the recipes I made, taste-testing and cooking with the results, evaluating the cost of canning when you have to buy (as opposed to grow) all your produce, and exploring other methods of preservation (my fermentation experiments have not gone well so far, and I remain cautious with pressure canning). And I will get right to all of that, as soon as I finish canning this cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving.