I Can't Take the Excitement

Yesterday was a big day. A. wanted to go to the county fair (small, smelly, boring) and I didn't. I wanted to go see Indiana Jones (first movie I've seen in MONTHS in a theater and it was . . . really not good--REALLY) and he didn't. So we did both, so we would each do something we wanted to do, and something we hated. Compromise--the reason we've been married for five years and no one is dead.

But the fun does not end there! Oh no! As if I hadn't had enough excitement for the day when we got home at 4 p.m., I just had to try pressure canning for the very first time. The MiL had ordered a pretty new pressure canner from the hardware store that was supposed to arrive two weeks ago. And it still hasn't. Meanwhile, we had six quarts each of chicken broth and mulberry juice languishing in our refrigerator, taking up space and in imminent danger of spoiling. And the MiL is out of town for a week, so it was all on me. So I borrowed a pressure canner from A.'s aunt, who has two.

I was very happy to have a pressure canner, but this is not the one I would have chosen for my first time (dirty). It's old, like at least 20 years old, and the seal is not great on it, and there were no instructions. I mean, Auntie gave me a crash course on the thing--it's not like she just sent me off with it with a merry, "Good luck! Don't blow yourself up!"--but I like to have directions I can read multiple times while I'm working. But chicken broth waits for no woman, so I forged ahead.

All went well with the getting it up to pressure, though it was kind of scary how it shook a little bit and puffed steam. When the broth was finished and it was time to lift the very heavy rack out of the pot, A. did it for me. He was wearing the oven mitts, so he also lifted the jars out of the rack. And here is where I made my mistake.

With hot water bath canning, you flip the jars upside-down to help them seal. That is what I told A. to do. This is not a good idea with pressure-canned jars, since they're under so much pressure (pause for chorus of "duh"s and eye rolling here). As we discovered when A. flipped over the third jar and molten-hot chicken broth sprayed across the kitchen and all over A. Luckily, A. is tough and he didn't get scalded. Much. Then, because I am not very quick on the uptake sometimes, I told him it must have just been the one jar, and he believed me. It's touching, really, the faith he has in me. Totally unwarranted, but touching. He flipped the next one and we repeated the fountain of chicken fat across the room. Oh well, the dogs thought all their Christmases had come at once when I let them in for the clean-up operation.

Anyway, I righted the jars and thanked God that I hadn't done the mulberry juice first. And then I DID do the mulberry juice, and all was well. Everything did seal, so it was mostly successful, despite my breathtaking stupidity.

So learn from me, kids: DO NOT turn pressure-canned jars upside-down.

And now, so that you may properly appreciate my awesomeness (and how intimidating this monster pressure canner was), behold my mad pressure-canning skillz:

Not pictured: Fountains of chicken fat.