If You Give A Girl A Canner . .

There are so many things that happen around here that remind me of the book, If You Give A Mouse A Cookie. Yesterday . . all day, I was thinking about that mouse!

My main chore to get done yesterday was to juice the elderberries from the freezer. When I harvest the elderberries, I cut them in clumps, put them in grocery sacks, put those in the freezer for a day or two and that makes them much easier to get off the stems. I thought I had four bags of elderberries in the freezer – 3 in the fridge freezer and 1 in the big freezer. I take the bags out one at a time, and get the berries in the juicer, then get the second bag and so on. When I got three in the fridge freezer done and went to get the one out of the big freezer, there wasn’t just one in there . . there were four so I had seven bags of berries to get processed and two of the bags were the big Menard’s bags. I figured that was three or four batches in the juicer so I thought . . while the juice is being extracted, I need to be upstairs tending to it so I’ll just get some beans in jars. That’s easy! I put 1/2 cup beans in a pint jar, fill with hot water, add salt – ready for the canner.

I knew I could put 19 pints in the canner but apparently I can’t count because when I got downstairs with the jars, put them in the canner but . . wait . . why do I have an extra jar? I had 20 jars, not 19 jars. The sensible thing to do would have been to take the one jar back upstairs, drain the water out, let those beans dry and use them the next time, or just toss 1/2 cup of beans. No! I didn’t do the sensible thing. I thought . . I can stick 9 jars in a second canner so I went back upstairs and filled 7 more jars . . that was all I could fill without opening another bag of beans so that canner had 8 jars in it. That’s a lot of beans to can in one day – 27 pints!

But, wait . . the elderberries are still juicing. Since I thought I had four bags of elderberries, I was counting on having about 7 jars of juice. I wasn’t counting on having seven bags, with two of them being larger bags. I ended up with 15 quarts of juice! I was planning on freezing the juice but there’s just not room for 15 quarts of juice in any freezer and I still have elderberries to harvest and they need room in the freezer.

I cooked the juice down and added sugar to make a light syrup. The elderberry syrup is refreshing when I add it to fizzy water from the Soda Stream. I can cook down a jar even more and make pancake syrup but I wasn’t doing that yesterday. I will also use this to make elderberry syrup (adding herbs and spices) that we use in the winter.

I ended up with 11 quarts of syrup. Isn’t it so pretty?

You can barely see herbs over on the right side. I had 2 quarts of dried basil, 1 pint of dried rosemary and 1 half pint of dried lemongrass that was in the freeze dryer and ready to come out yesterday morning.

Today – probably no canning. I think it will be a cross stitching day!