Recipe experiments and failures

Canning season is here again.

When cherries were on sale a couple of weeks ago, I bought several bags of cherries to can. I prefer Flathead cherries, but with the fact that there is no one from here hauling the cherries down from Montana anymore, we had run out of canned cherries. 

The cherry canning went well, then our kids hollered to see if we wanted apricots. The tree at their place was dropping its fruit and it was ready to take care of. So last week was apricot week. I sorted them into three tubs, those to be canned whole, those to be juiced and those to be chicken treats. 

It took a few days to get them done, because of the heat I like to can in the evening when I can exhaust the heat out of the house while the cool air is coming in the bedroom window. That meant some late nights. 

The last night was the worst. I was canning the last of three canner loads of apricots in quarts. It was late, I had just put in the last load about 11 p.m. and was cleaning up the sinks when I heard a sound from the canner. It was a sound I have heard before and I knew it meant that a jar had broken. Sure enough when I took the lid off I found one jar floated up in the canner. I grabbed the jar lifter and took that jar out. I had just finished that and put the lid back on the canner, just a little ajar so the water doesn’t rattle it too much when I heard a different kind of pop. I lifted the lid to find that a jar had completely blew a lid off. And before I could get that sorted out a second jar blew its lid. It exploded syrup, apricots and pits all over the stove, the counters and the floor. 

So at close to midnight I cleaned my whole kitchen, mopped the floor twice and cleaned the stove, it had syrup in all of the burner wells deep enough to keep the burners from lighting. There were pieces of apricots and pits almost to the living room. Everything in my kitchen was sticky. Horribly sticky. It took two buckets of hot mop water to get the sticky all off of the kitchen floor. 

I put the rest of the apricots through the steam juicer and reminded myself why that was the one of the best investments I have made for my food preservation. I now have nearly 4 gallons of apricot nectar to make into jelly and sauce. 

First on the list will be apricot-jalapeno jam, then apricot-pineapple, and lastly some apricot nectar to use just as a drinking juice. So this batch of apricots is done, I might end up with more. But for now I have to figure out why the jars were blowing rings and lids off in the canner and check out some new recipes for jams, jellies and other goodies. 

This recipe is from a cookbook printed in 1945.

2 ½ pounds apricots

3 cups pineapple

3 cups sugar

Wash and slice apricots, mix with sugar and pineapple (fruit and juice). Cook until desired consistency. Pour into sterilized jars and seal while hot. 

Note: The jam will need to be processed in a boiling water bath canner for 10 minutes.