Putting Up Fruit

Don’t you think the epitome of being called a good cook is your ability to put stuff up? I mean, if you go in someone’s house and there are lovely mason jars on the shelves doesn’t that give you a deliciously warm all over feeling? It certainly beats the ambiance of my house where the only
good smell is coming from a dollar store apple scented candle! I mean, Hey! I love to bake, truly, but cook? Puh-lease, that is so overdone! Ha, overdone…

Still, now and then I try to do something besides make bread or something sinfully wicked like Chocolate Pudding Cake. I can do country-fried steak and fried chicken and refried beans; that should count for something, right? I know, counts for the fact I grew up in the south and love the desert, quit laughing! One of these days, I will be a great cook!

Well, all right, perhaps not a great cook, I would settle for having more than a few recipes to my name and one of the things I would really, really love to be able to do is put up fruit.

What am I saying? I have absolutely no desire to can. I mentally renamed the eighth month of the year to ‘Lion’ just to get away from the memory of heated kitchen, boiling water, sink full of ripe tomatoes and the never-ending water bath! Well, perhaps not quite that bad but close!

With that said, do you wonder why I want to do fruit? Just as much work, still have to be ever so particular about getting the jars and lids sterilized, plus you have to cook the fruit and sugar for hours instead of just putting the vegetables into jars and water bathing them for a few minutes.
Must have something to do with the canned fruit itself then.

This is silly. Want to know how many jar of preserves hubby and I consume in a year?

Right.  None.

I used to keep a jar of strawberry preserves in the house for the kids. When it got to be a couple of months old and no one had even opened it I would make shortbread. Using the strawberry preserves as a filling for shortbread is delicious. Kids loved it too. Not too sweet, lasted a couple of
days and the strawberry preserves got eaten. Win, win.

It must be due to the new site I found. Well, it found me I suppose. There was a recipe on the sidebar of Facebook so I followed it.

The site is justapinch.com and after looking around a bit, I joined up. Tons of great recipes, loads of wonderful people and even a dangling carrot! What is that? Well see, if the test kitchen people make your recipe in their kitchen you might get a blue ribbon! What could be better! And you don’t
have to wait for the Fair to come to town! On top of that, you actually receive a for real Blue Ribbon! Too cool dude!

It was while I was wandering the recipe aisle that I found the pear preserve recipe. The picture was just so pretty I thought, now wouldn’t that be pretty on our shelf?

On the other hand, it would still be sitting there a decade or more from now, so perhaps I should stick to bread, eh?

Hey! I Heard That! :)