Can-A-Thon

I usually don't post about myself, but this weekend I indulged in some time spent on things that I love to do. Namely saving some money, working with fresh ingredients, and hanging out with great friends. That's right, you guessed it! I was part of the first ever Casad/Fay Can-A-Thon. Now I know you're thinking to yourself, "wow that's exciting....what exactly is a can-a-thon?" Let me start at the beginning.

It all started when our neighbor left for a long weekend and asked us to help harvest tomatoes while he was gone. No problem. Except Bob and Judy have about eight tomato plants that produce eight million tomatoes. June and I would go over with a basket during naptime and I could sit in one spot next to his tomato jungle and pick a bushel of tomatoes (I actually don't know what a bushel is, but it was a lot of tomatoes). So I had all these tomatoes and a person can only eat so many BLT's before you need to find something else to do with tomatoes. I called Jan, and soon I was set up to can tomatoes. Then I attempted salsa, then marinara sauce, and finally I made some seasoned crushed tomatoes (they were supposed to be marinara but I ran out of time to simmer them so just canned them before they turned into marinara). I mentioned this to my good friend Annette who started telling me stories of canning with her mother. I thought to myself, "this is awesome! Annette actually knows how to do this stuff. I could learn a lot from her!" So I mentioned we should can sometime together. Whether she thought it was a good idea or not, all of sudden we had a can-a-thon planned for Labor Day weekend. She had grapes that would be ready for jelly, tomatoes for salsa (we provided some jalapenos), and a nearby abandoned apple orchard would provide a place for the kids to romp around as well as provide some applesauce. Saturday night we started romping in the apple orchard picking a couple bushels of apples (really, bushels), we cut up ingredients for salsa (my hands only stung slightly from the peppers), and we cleaned, sorted, and smashed grapes for jelly. At the end of the night we were tired and didn't have much to show for our work but five bags of grapes hanging in a pot and two large pots of chopped up veggies. However, I had learned a lot about grapes already and no one had chopped off any fingers with the newly sharpened knives. Not bad for one evening.

All day Sunday I was dying to go back. I wanted something to show for our work but we were exhausted after a day of church and anyway, shouldn't we labor on Labor Day? So bright and early (10 am) we headed back to casa del Casad and started in on a marathon of canning. Karl, Doug, James, and Annette's mom Agnes peeled, sliced, dewormed, and soaked 3 vats of apples while Annette and I jellied and salsa-ed. Jelly is awesome. You start out with cloudy light purple juice and end up with crystal clear purple jems. I think we canned about 16 pints of concord grape jelly. On to salsa. 7 quarts of salsa later (and one for the fridge) it was time to start on all those apples. We tried something new. Apple pie filling. 14 quarts of pie filling (that's 7 pies worth) went really quickly and we were on to applesauce. Amazingly we were running short of cleaned and cut apples, so the new team of apple cutters (me, Doug, and Agnes) went to work. By the time we finished the second full bucket of apples, we had 6 quarts of applesauce and 4 or so more to can. It was also getting close to 5 pm so the Fays called it a night and let the Casad's finish up the hard work.

I had high hopes for our can-a-thon, but I never thought I would have such an amazing sense of accomplishment after a weekend of tough work. Looking at those jars lined up on the counter, growing by the hour, was so rewarding. So if you want to hang out some time and make me a very happy person, just pull out a bushel of some amazing home-grown ingredient and tell me I'm spending my day canning. I'll give you a big hug and kiss. And I'll even let you keep some of the result.