Tuesday, July 10, 2012

"I Love My Job!" My friends hear me say this often.  During the last two weeks I have had the privilege of teaching Beginner Canning Classes.  Today we learned to use a pressure canner to preserve low-acid foods (green beans, carrots, etc). Last week I taught how to use the water bath method to can tomatoes.  I used the water bath method last year when I decided I was going to have my own garden (yes I planted over 25 plants and had tomatoes everywhere).  But today using the pressure canner I was a bit nervous and felt unprepared. My supervisor from another county, Sara, had agreed to come help teach the class since I was uncomfortable.  In preparing for the class I took the new canner out of the box, read instructions, and prepared the canner just as the instructions said.  During class everything was going great.  We had blanched the green beans, put them in the jars, then had the pressure canner loaded and ready.  Until (yes the dreaded until).  As we begin to heat the canner pressure is susposed to build up inside, the pressure wasn't building.  OH NO, it wasn't working like i had always been taught.  Thankful momma Sara  that's what we sometimes call her because she is like a mother to all she works with, was here we decided it was losing pressure around the guage.  So here we had to decompress the canner and we discovered a gasket had been broken.  So after fixing that we reassembled the canner and thankful what we did worked because it started holding pressure, our beans finished processing.  Everyone was so excited about the results and getting to take the a jar of fresh green beans home.  They will be so good this winter.  Yes "I Love My Job"!