Pickles and Jelly

My sister Jewel makes the best pickles.   THE.Best.Pickles!

In the past I always tried to get together with her to make them (which really just entailed me sitting around pretending to be useful while she did all the work) but for the second year in a row - I was on my own!    Last year, I was determined to do it alone because I felt I needed to learn how to do it, which ended up being a big mistake!   Most of the jars didn't seal and ended up being thrown out, and I swore that I'd never do pickles without Jewel again.    

When the hutterites called me this week and said that cucumbers were ready - I snatched up 20 lbs quickly, without even remembering that Jewel was at a family reunion all week long.    Crap!!!!!!!

Me again.   

Well, me and 20 lbs of cucumbers;)

So, I did my very best to make my sister proud. 

I filled each jar with dill, garlic and a pinch of cream of tartar.  

 (Jewel says that's to make them crunchy:)

Then I filled them with cucumbers.   This year I made sure to put more then eight in a jar.   I really crammed those babies in!!      

Then I filled the jars with Jewels fabulous brine recipe and sealed them the way she recommends.    

I fell asleep that night listening to the glorious sound of lids popping!   

It'll be a few months before I know for sure, but I'm thinking this years pickle making endeavor just might have been - a Success!!!

As if that wasn't enough though, the same day the hutterites called for cucumbers to be picked up, was the same day John picked hundreds of crab apples off our back yard tree, AND happened to also be the same day my Father in law stopped by with tonnes of delicious juice from his home grown berries.    

But of course this would all come on the same day, right!

Seeing as the kitchen was already a hot and sticky mess, we decided to just keep going.   

First we washed the apples and threw them into this handy dandy steamer that we bought for Max last year.   (That makes us sound awesome doesn't it?   Well, we bought it for him after we had melted his into complete nothingness, so really, it was the least we could do;)

This juice was the prettiest color coming out, and made the kitchen smell oh so sweet!

Then I divided this juice into about a kazillion batches that took about 80 hundred thousand hours to boil.    The nice thing about all of this, is that John was home and stuck with me for the whole project.   I'll tell ya, that was some major quality time we spent together that day!   

Then we threw them into a water bath (which is a process that still totally freaks me out).

....And Oila!

Just like that, we had a year supply of Jelly!

(Which won't last nearly a year because my kids go through one of those a DAY the little bums!)