Food Preperation

I love this book! I can't wait to get started on water bath canning and fermenting! ( )

My copy of the Ball Blue Book, the one that I think of as "new", was actually published in 1995, so I decided it was past time to treat myself to a 21st century canning guide. This book both surpasses my expectations and falls somewhat short.

I was delighted to find recipes for two kinds of mustard! It has been very difficult to find a trustworthy recipe for mustard that does not require refrigerator storage. Also elusive has been a recipe for pickled brussels sprouts. I found one years ago in Canadian Living, but lost the recipe again (if I even ever had the chutzpah to remove the magazine from International Tires waiting room!). Here it is, or something just as good.

I was also delighted to find paired recipes for blueberry syrup and blueberry butter made from the leftover pulp. I love a twofer! (Hint: if you thaw frozen strawberries and use the dripped-off juice for making jelly, the pulp is great for making strawberry-rhubarb-sour cream pie. You're welcome.)

I was less happy with the 21st Century fancy recipe book format. One recipe per page, okay. Full page colour picture facing each recipe, increases the price of the book and doesn't really add to the usefulness because jam looks like jam, but fine, I can live with it. Recipes for using canned food interspersed with the actual recipes for canning, not so thrilled. Look at the bottom of the page to see if there are processing times given!

One of the things I liked about my 1995 Ball Blue Book was the sheer number of recipes and the crowded format that squeezed four or five recipes onto a page (I suspect that there were almost as many recipes in 120 pages as this one has in 350) so you could compare several versions of tomato sauce or salsa without a lot of page flipping. This book has a feature that does much the same thing, which I think I will come to love. Easily found by the coloured edges of the pages, green-rimmed pages contain tables of jams or pickles or fruits, giving quantities for simple and basic preserving. For example, there is a page of Fruit Butter basics with fruits, liquids, sweeteners and flavouring suggestions to mix and match, plus instructions for making the spread in a slow cooker and processing. It looks intriguing! ( )