UNDER PRESSURE

Whew! Got that done...off my mind and off my to-do list. I just finished canning pickled beets and dilled green beans. The vegetables had been waiting for me and I was under pressure that they would spoil before I could get to them. I had big plans yesterday to get the zucchini grated and frozen, the beets pickled, and the beans dilled, but...as it seems to happen...Tessa and Wylie came down with a virus that's going around. I have not been summoned that often since all my kids were little. "Mom...Mama...Mom...Mom...Mama...Mom..." Aaaargh! Anyway, between tending to the two sickies, I only managed to get the zucchini dealt with and baked two loaves of zucchini bread and made supper. Oh, and did two loads of laundry, ran Taylie to work at 10:00, and back into town to pick her up at 2:00.

So it is a big relief today to have the rest of the veggies processed and gleaming green and purple in their jars. Canning is always kind of a high tension thing for me. Aside from the "get 'em done before they rot" thing, I get stressed by kids underfoot when I'm working with boiling liquids and hot jars. I don't even deal with pressure canning; I stick to boiling water bath canning. Probably a carry-over from my childhood when my mother would be canning tomatoes and practically shriek at my sister and me to "GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN!! THIS THING COULD BLOW UP!!" Scared the wits out of us as we hid at the far end of the house with visions of our mom dying in an explosion of steaming hot tomatoes. No thank you. I'm perfectly content to buy my tomatoes precanned from the store. My dear friend, Linda, pressure cans tomatoes. I can only assume her mother didn't do any canning when Linda was little. Ignorance is bliss.