Canning

I've been really wanting to can fruit and vegetables with my MOL since one of my SIL's mentioned it me in Mountain Lake, MN. She came with the idea when she saw a huge collection of canning jars in grandma's basement after her burial. I got excited about it but didn't really get a chance to get together with them for that purpose. Yesterday, Isabelle and I are over to my friend Tricia's house to can two 4-gallon buckets of pears. They have a pear tree in front of their house and before they rot we thought they have to be canned. We went to Fleet farm to buy our supplies and started our long day of canning pears. We have a couple recipes we tried and they both turned out super yummy! Thankfully, Isabelle was in her most wonderful mood ever! She was just playing with Tricia's kids' toys by herself, watching the Veggie Tales movies and eating surprisingly well. She was content. I had all the freedom to work on our canning thing. We started at 12 noon and finished at 8 in the evening. Well, we could have really finished it much earlier than that, like before 5, but you know how it is when two super talkative, full-of-emotions and beautiful young ladies are doing something together. Anyway, we found canning to be really fun. Now we are planning to call my friend who have an apple orchard in Northfield and asked her if we could pick some apples and we will can them. Exciting!

Mixing chunks of pears in the honey-spiced juice we made.

The first batch of our canned Pear Honey. It is so yummy on plain bread or on ice cream.