CT: In the Can....

I'm not entirely sure why Wende has pulled the plug on CT. I thought it was going along as well as these voluntary group projects seem to go.

I have been wrapped up in my own world a lot lately, it's true. And, I admit, I was lazy about looking up assignments. I didn't like paging back through Wende's entries and ignoring them...so until it was linked in the sidebar, I was rather lazy about getting to the weeks assignments. In fact, I hadn't even seen Decade Five when I saw that the project had been canceled. Pity. I was looking forward to what might happen next.

Meanwhile, however, I went ahead and did something I've always wanted to do and have never done before. And I'll do it again, too.

I made pearsauce.

It started when I bought 7 litres of unripe green Bartlett pears. No, I have no idea, really, how many pounds that is. By the time they were really ripe and ready for fooling about with, the family (and I) had eaten a fair number of them from the box.

Someone at 3FC suggested I make pearsauce. I cruised the internet while the pears were ripening and discovered you make it just like applesauce...and in fact a few recipes I found on-line suggested making it with apples to help keep it sweet.

But what made this whole endeavour CT-worthy was not that I made perasauce--anyone can make pearsauce and freeze it. Nuh-uh, what made this culinary therapy was that I canned it.

I read up on canning on-line. (I was on-line a lot last week! The Internet is my friend.) I went to three different stores one evening before I found the one that would even carry such a thing. Canadians will not be surprised that, no, there weren't any at Sears. And no, the Big Grocery Stores didn't have them either. The place to go? Canadian Tire. But they were sold out.

My pears were ripening quickly. I had, at most, likely 24 hours before they turned to mush. We packed the cell phone with the husband's lunch the next day and I printed off a photograph and slipped it in his lunch. He was to visit another Canadian Tire store across town after work --and to a nearby Superstore Walmart and report on what he found there. He called and told me he found a little home canning kit, to wit:

a jar lifter
a funnel (to fill the jars easily)
and two other little gizmos:
one, a "head space" measurer and bubble remover-in-one (no joke),
and, two, a little magnetic lid lifter.

I told him to buy it. But there were no canners. Not one. So, he moved on to the Wallys. They had a canner--but they wanted $45.00 for it. Something had to be wrong with that, so I told him to leave it there and come home.

Then, I called every single Canadian Tire and found out that 1) there was a mini-canner available at precisely one store, (big enough for pints, but not quarts) and 2) there may have been a shipping problem with the larger canners as CT hasn't seen any of those since the spring.

So, I high-tailed it off to the store and got the mini-canner and the jars. Oh--and I also bought a handy dandy book on canning by Bernardin.




And so I measured out my pears: 5 3/4 pounds. I think I had about 4 Galas on hand. So, I used those.



Aurelia and I peeled. And cored. And peeled. And cored.

And several hours later, we had this.



Yep.

Three pints.

That is all.