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Pickling and canning? Of course you can!

You can conquer canning. Here are 12 recipes for sweet jams, savory chutneys, and crunchy pickles a plenty that will leave your mouth watering and your can-do attitude soaring.

Plum jam

The Rowdy Chowgirl
It is plum season and piles of fruit in tones from deep purple to a delicate mottled green are ready for eating.

  • By Laura Edwins Contributor

(Adapted from Sure-Jell recipe) 

7 cups pitted and finely diced plums, peels left on (buy about 4 pounds of ripe plums and eat any extras)
1/2 cup water
4-1/2 cups sugar, divided
1 box low sugar/no sugar powdered pectin

1. Bring canner, half full with water, to simmer. Wash eight 8-ounce jars and screw bands in dishwasher to sterilize. Leave in dishwasher until ready to use. Place flat lids in small saucepan, cover with water, and bring to a gentle simmer. Turn off heat and let stand in hot water until ready to use.

2. Take 1/4 cup of the sugar and mix with the pectin in a separate small bowl. Set aside.

3. Pit unpeeled plums. Finely chop fruit. Place fruit in saucepan and add water. Bring to boil. Reduce heat to medium-low. Simmer for 5-10 minutes (until they look soft and cooked), stirring occasionally and mash a bit with a potato masher. Measure exactly 6-1/2 cups prepared fruit into a heavy-bottomed stockpot.

4. Add pectin/sugar mixture to fruit in stock pot. Bring to full rolling boil (a boil that doesn’t stop bubbling when stirred) on high heat, stirring constantly. Stir in remaining 4-1/4 cups sugar. Return to full rolling boil and boil exactly 1 minute, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Let sit for 2 minutes, stirring occasionally and skimming off any foam with a metal spoon.

(Save the foam! It is delicious. Put it in the refrigerator and use it within a few days. Stir it into your yogurt, put it on your ice cream, or just use it like jam. It is jam really, just foamier.)

5. Ladle into prepared jars, filling to within 1/8 inch of tops. Run a butter knife around inside of jars to remove air pockets. Wipe jar rims and threads. Cover with lids. Screw bands on tightly. Place jars on rack in canner. Water must cover jars by 1 to 2 inches. Add boiling water, if necessary. Cover and bring water to gentle boil. Process for 10 minutes.

6. Remove jars and place upright on a towel to cool completely. After jars cool, check seals by pressing middles of lids with finger. (If lids spring back, lids are not sealed and refrigeration is necessary.)

11 of 12
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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