I cannot tell you how much I love this book. I mulled over numerous canning books this last spring and this one gave me the inspiration I was hunting for. I love love love that the recipes aren't for enormous batches of this that or the other. These are things you can start and finish in two hours. Obviously some things take a little longer than others but if you go to the farmers market and come across say, garlic scapes, and you want to try pickling them without buying 20 lbs of them, here's your book. And who would've ever thought to pickle garlic scapes in the first place? Oh, this book.
The lay out is by season and recipes so easy to follow. I love that there's a section at the end on how to have your own canning party and different themes. Fun! Ok well, fun for me and other geeky gals that like to do this kind of thing.
Here are my pickled garlic scapes and dilly beans. BTW the dilly beans have been a huge hit. I basically haven't bought pickles since I made these since we use them everywhere we would use pickles. When using fresh dill I highly recommend using the flowering heads because they provide a more pronounced dill flavor.
On another day I pulled these baby beets and baby rainbow carrots from my garden and turned them into...
Pickled curry baby carrots and pickled beets with allspice and juniper berries. So good!
I've always used the water bath method for all my canning but have started taking more advantage of just refrigerator canning things. Thomas Keller even has a section on this in his Ad Hoc book which has made me think of canning as more of an every/anyday kind of thing when you have leftover produce instead of just once or twice a year. Which to me is very practical but my poor husband thinks my obsession with all things in jars (which has managed to take over the entire top shelf of our fridge mind you) is well, a little obsessive.
