#1,322 Canning.

This morning while I was making Ben’s coffee I realized that our pear tree was so heavy with fruit that the branches were near breaking and touching the ground. I always thought pears weren’t ripe until closer to autumn since that’s when it seems mama always makes her famous pear cake with caramel icing, but I guess I was confused. After lunch I took off my church clothes and grabbed a bucket thinking that would be plenty to carry our harvest out to my parents’ house so she could teach me how to make preserves.

Turns out I needed more than 1 bucket.

We took it all over to mama’s so she could teach me how to can and we would have enough to give everyone spiced pears for Christmas gifts. After washing, peeling and slicing 2 grocery bags full I decided we will just give away the rest of the pears. That’s a LOT of work, y’all.

Serendipitously, Titanic was on AMC (!!!) so we watched that while we stirred, boiled, washed and canned.

I learned that it takes a LOT of sugar to make 6 jars of preserves.

We divided the batch so half could be spiced candy pears. To do this, you just let red hots melt in the preserves before you put them in the jars.

And for some of the pears, we sliced them and prepared them for freezing. I’ll use these to make pies and mama’s pear cake in a few weeks!

And here we have the literal fruits of our labor.

Canning is sort of tough. Y’all need to have some major respect for your grannies.