Laying up food for the winter

My mother has always canned and bottled food. Growing up we considered it a crime against the family if we bought jam or salsa as those were two of her more prolific stored foods. When we moved when I was ten my parents scouted out houses and found one with raspberries, boysenberries, strawberries, and apples and were were so excited about the jams, applesauce, etc that we could do. Peaches and pears are the two staple fruits she does and she often would do most of the canning while we were at school. Pears were the one exception. I have vivid memories of my mother telling us that our schedules were booked on the day it was time to do pears. Peaches, jams, salsas, and just about everything else she could do on her own. But pears were a group effort and we were all needed. My mother didn't "book" our schedules much, but pears were scheduled every year.

So you can imagine my trepidation when I decided that I was going to can pears this year. And not just any pears, but pears from our own tree. I originally thought of doing pear honey - a mix of pears, pineapple, and sugar (in equal quantities) that my father has done before - but I decided that I could can our modest crop and then have them all year round. Canned pears are one of my favorite fruit. Many times I even prefer them to fresh, but that depends on ripeness of the fresh pear.

We got quart jars from my wife's grandparents, as well as a bath canner cage - we had the bath canner. I looked up the instructions for canning in my Better Homes and Garden's cookbook (14th edition). I still have my 11th edition that I bought when I left for college. I tend to use them as my first "go-to" cook book for everything. The problem this time was that I basically said that I shouldn't can pears the way I've seen my mother do it for years. A quick phone call to my mother took care of that. After running to the store for some more lids, I saddled up to start canning.

 First I washed and peeled them, which generally takes the longest time. The common problem with working with pears is that it's hard to get a whole crop (or box) that's ripe all together. This was about how many pears I had to work with, but you'll notice they range in color from green to yellow. Depending on how ripe they are you can skin them by blanching them, but often you just have to take the skins off by hand, with a sharp knife. Then you core them and slice them. My right had is still feeling a little cramping.

 Next of course, you put them in jars, add a sweet syrup (we used a 2 C. water for 1 C. sugar), attach the lids and put them in the bath canner. Reading up on a few things I learned that you use water to better transfer the heat to the bottles and, consequently, the fruit inside. I learned from my parents long ago that canning is far more comfortable in warm weather when you have a Camp Chef stove you can put it on outside. I was glad that I didn't run out of propane partway through, but even had enough for our fire pit to cook dinner over.

 After you pull the bottles out, they cool and create a vacuum inside the bottle which seals the lids. We had one that didn't seal for some reason - so we're eating those pears, but in the end we got 10 quarts of pears for this next year. I'm also glad that we were able to preserve a lot of fruit that would have otherwise gone bad. These bottles were the first batch we did and they all sealed.

This picture was from earlier that day. Tigger and Kanga were playing with the neighbor's pets, a couple of dogs and a couple of cats. I like their cats. 1 - because they're not bad mousers. 2 - they're pretty friendly. and 3 - they aren't mine.