Preserving Life: Stories through canning

I got in a fight with a canning pot while making strawberry-rhubarb jam. The canning pot won, as shown by the giant burn on my right hand.

The perfect balance of sweet and sour was what I was looking for – maple syrup, honey, brown sugar and a little lemon. It was all about the strawberries, though, so I drove out of town to find them. Well, maybe I didn’t rent the car, ask my aunt to get married, buy a dress, and drive two and a half hours out of my way just to get serendipitously lost partway there at a farm stand selling just-picked organic strawberries that tasted like summer. But I like to think that’s what happened. The young 20-something crowd was mysteriously absent from Ye Olde Farm and Wedding Grounds (almost the real name…). Sadly, none of the potential crowd of my aunt’s soon-to-be-husband’s bachelor nephews had braved the cornfields to find the farm and attend the service.

But they hadn’t seen my dress. If they’d seen my dress they would have come. Red, skin-tight, corseted in the back, short, fun skirt with stiff waves. Biking around Montreal to save money on a car or public transit sure has its advantages when you try to wear a dress like this. In winter I wouldn’t be caught dead in this dress unless I’d been hiding from the snow squalls by running at the gym. Sadly that works sometimes if your apartment sucks out the heat like an inside-out vacuum and the only way you can get your toes to warm up is pound them repeatedly into a treadmill.

Which is kind of what happened to my face when I got in a fight with a bicycle rack attached to the trunk of the car I was driving that day. Inevitably, the bicycle rack won.

And no amount of strawberry-rhubarb jam could fix my mood or my face.

Next: Recipe for strawberry-rhubarb jam from The Joy of Cooking.