I need some space

Oh, 35 pounds of tomatoes, the problem isn't you, it's me. (Well, actually, it's my limited burner surface area.)

Usually I can manage a rather high level of culinary gymnastics during a big curry night or a personal cheffing session by getting creative: starting some things in the stove and then moving them to the oven, say, or using the plug-in rice cooker for grains. But tonight I found myself with a bit of a math problem: 4 burners, and at least 7 pots that need them. (Where is my favorite math teacher when I need him?)

So riddle me this, culinary mathemagicians: How would you account for

• 1 burner: pot of applesauce that needs to be kept hot for canning
• 1 burner: tureen of vegan pho broth that still needs simmering for another 3 hours
• 1 burner: a large pot of boiling water for scalding tomatoes
• 1 burner: medium pot of simmering water to keep jar lids sterile
• 2 burners: the giant canning pot
• 1 burner: the tamale I was going to warm up for dinner...?

My solution: Work in waves. (This is the kind of problem solving that got me into advanced math classes back in 7th grade, thank you very much.)

BURNERS 1 & 2: giant canning pot to sterilize jars, then process filled jars
BURNER 3: applesauce cooking, then tomato scalding
BURNER 4: 1 pot of simmering water to keep jar lids sterile

As for the pho broth: I boiled and then removed it from the stove and covered it to keep warm, then returned it to BURNER 3 when tomatoes were processing. Oh, and dinner: a tamale steamed in a strainer precariously balanced over the canning pot, along with a spinach salad and a limoncello tonic. (What, BURNER 4 was busy warming some tea to make a batch of kombucha!) Next time when I really get cooking I could also break out the portable propane burner, and maybe even the beercan stove -- how did I only think of those now? And maybe I can rig some kind of solar cooker in my sunny front room....

I am a professional

But, as I tell my students, everyone messes things up sometimes, too. Life is a learning experience.

I've been canning for about four years now, but until yesterday, I'd never broken a jar. I am, as you might guess from my obsession with equipment sterilization, a bit of a stickler about technique. And yet somehow, I managed yesterday to break not one, not two, not even THREE jars while canning. Four jars. Now in pieces in the recycling bin. Embarrassing, but true. Three perfect pint jars and one beautiful quart of tomatoes exploded over the course of one solo canning session as I rushed to get things wrapped up before heading to a Nats game. I'd poked around the jars with a chopstick before sealing them to clear out any potentially explosive air bubbles. Apparently not well enough.

Some days, you just need to throw in the towel. Or rather, you mop your brow with a kitchen towel and fish out the tender, floating tomato bits in the canning pot and make tomato sauce (with lots of red wine...in the sauce, and also for the person making the sauce) and try again.

Maybe, I thought, it was the equipment. Or maybe, I reconsidered, as the equipment has not changed much since last time I canned tomatoes, my canning mojo was just off. Maybe I needed help.

And help I had. Today, Kenton came over this afternoon. After treating me to a lovely brunch, he assisted me in disposing of the 5 FLATS OF AMAZING HEIRLOOM TOMATOES I picked up from McLeaf's Orchard. A few caprese salads eaten, a few pounds given to my landlady (share the wealth, right?), 24 pint jars of tomatoes cooling, and with 6 jars of (non-explosion-induced) savory tomato sauce processing right now, we're done. The glass of wine tonight was just for good measure. After all, I am a professional.

A not-so-lazy Sunday

When my boyfriend and I decided to spend yesterday together, I wondered how it was going to go down. His agenda: football. My agenda: canning. Seems incongruous, no? Successful relationships are all about compromise.

As he cracked open a beer and settled down to some snacks at my kitchen table, Kenton joked that he couldn't just sit there like the lazy grasshopper in the children's story while the ant processed 25 lbs of tomatoes. ("Who are you calling an ant?") I am not one to turn down help in the kitchen, mind you, so as the NFL pre-game commentary yammered on in the background, I gave the grasshopper a quick primer on canning: wash, sterilize, score, scald, fill, check, seal, process, cool.

Kenton scored and scalded tomatoes during commercial breaks, peeled heads of garlic with increasing zeal in the clove smashing department as the game went on and the just-returned star quarterback biffed another key play. I stirred fresh garlic and basil and red wine into the pasta sauce simmering on the back burner, poked air bubbled out of jars of tomatoes before sealing them, and paused to wave my jar grabber to echo the protest against another bad call by the must-be-almost-blind referee.

I'm happy to report that though the Redskins did not have a win under their belt, the afternoon was not lost: we had 10 quarts of processed tomatoes cooling on the counter. Not bad for an ant and a grasshopper on a Sunday afternoon.

Si se puede!

One of the things I love most about educating is that I almost always learn as much as I teach. It's both exhilarating and humbling. During my time working in the public school system, as I taught about subject-verb agreement and irony, my high schoolers gave me a primer on rap and fashion and slang. ("Who is this '50 Cents' character, and what the heck did he ever do to get shot NINE times? And those pants, why, you can see his underwear!" Yes, I had lots to learn. Still do.)

Teaching and learning don't just take place in the classroom, of course, and the pattern has not abated since my shift from teaching English literacy to educating about sustainable food. At a recent canning workshop in Takoma Park -- the first multicultural Padres Latinos/Linkages to Learning weekly gathering of the school year at Rolling Terrace Elementary -- I am certain that I learned at least as much as the dozen or so latina ladies I had been hired to teach. In this case, I was leading a hands-on workshop in Spanish on preparing and preserving fresh salsa, by special request of the group of local moms from a variety of Latin American countries. After an overview of the canning process and passing out of ingredients and equipment, everyone laughed and chatted away as we proceeded to prepare and process pint jars of spicy, aromatic salsa fresca. I found myself learning useful new words like "hervir" (to boil)... and realizing that I had mistranslated a few things on the worksheet I'd handed out. Luckily most of my errors were pretty obvious to the ladies -- one doesn't use "pepinos" (cucumbers) in salsa, but rather "pimientos" (peppers) -- and they helped me with a few of the technical terms like "higienica," which I said no less than 17 times as we sterilized and sealed our jars (kindly donated by the local ACE Hardware) filled with freshly made salsa (with beautiful organic produce donated by Potomac Vegetable Farms).



It was a lot of fun, and the women were kind enough to tolerate my Spanglish. (Michelle, my capable co-teacher, began far fewer of her sentences with "Como se dice..." than I did, to be sure, and often stepped in when I got flustered trying to explain concepts like checking to be sure the button on each jar lid was sucked downward during cooling to ensure a safe seal. Mil gracias, Michelle!) My vocabulary turned out to be less of a challenge than some of the technical limitations of the stove-less space: unfortunately, the electric, single burner contraptions we were using to heat giant pots of water didn't "hervieron con fuerza" during the 2-hour session. (Note to self: next time make sure a giant pot of water *can* get to a rolling boil on a single-burner stove.) I left the program director, Maria, with very detailed instructions and she told me later that after the requisite 45 minutes at a rolling boil and cooling of the jars, all but one of them sealed successfully. Hooray!







Even the principal seemed excited when a few of us brought some of the extra salsa to the main office at the end of the session, and a number of the ladies departed with extra jars and ingredients to try making more at home. Ah. What a day of learning for us all.



(5 points for those of you who didn't roll their eyes at my nerdy bilingual pun subject heading.)

Can do

Meet Boris.



He's an industrial-strength canning pressure cooker. Feast your eyes on all that steel. Those dials. The serious clamps. That... pressure. To be honest, he makes me a little nervous. (What's that? Yes, I have named my friend Mike's pressure cooker Boris. Paolo -- my espresso machine on loan -- finds this perfectly normal. Betty -- my food processor -- agrees.)

At the height of the summer produce bounty, I have begun to dabble in the food preservation arts. I've made ice cream and am getting better with the dehydrator. (Round two of the figs went much better, certainly less shoe-leathery. I've dehydrated and frozen tomatoes with varying degrees of success.) And now I'm teaching myself to can. All it took was a crate of really ripe peaches from one of my favorite local farmers, my friend Mike's recent investment in a pressure cooker, a 12-pack of mason jars, and a few books from the library and I was off ...or was I?

Mike insisted that I read an article on botulism before we got started. I suspect this was so I wasn't tempted to "wing it" like I do for other kitchen-related endeavors. For you see, appropriate acidity levels, temperature, pressure, and cooking times are critical. I'd hate to accidentally kill anyone off with a lethal birthday gift of homemade jam. Then there was the danger of incorrectly sealing/removing Boris' lid. We read the manual. Twice. As we were gathering our materials to make the first batch of lavender peach preserves, I began to wonder: would the first canning-related injury be in the form of food poisoning or a loss of flesh/limbs from an exploding pressure cooker?



As it turns out, I was so nervous about getting it wrong on my first go round that I wimped out and used Boris as a giant water bath (for warming jars) rather than as a pressure cooker (for processing them). This meant that the jam would be cooked but would have to be refrigerated. Yes, I realize this defeats the purpose of having a pressure cooker, the main point of which is to preserve food so that you can store it without refrigeration, but come on people, you must know by now that I am chicken-hearted. Sure, I flambe my risotto, but I always have a fire extinguisher handy. (I'd also deviated from the recipe, cutting the sugar portion in half -- I mean, really, 4 cups of sugar for 4 pints of jam?? It makes my teeth hurt just thinking about it. I know, I know: "Stick to the recipe, Ibti....") As soon as the jars of preserves were cooled they went directly into the fridge.

But a few tote bags of heirloom tomatoes following a workshare shift at Clagett Farm and a crate of tomato seconds from a generous farmer at the Crossroads farmers' market last week prompted us to try again. This time we decided to really do this.



We agreed to divide up the tasks: Mike largely handled the pressure cooking and timing pieces while I prepared the tomatoes and jars. Everything went into the pressure cooker in an inch and a half of water. Once it started steaming, we put the 10-pound weight on. Twenty minutes later -- the recipe called for ten, but you know that botulism article was pretty frightening -- we turned off the heat and let the pressure drop to zero. Mike loosened the lid and lifted the processed jars to the cooling racks while I stood a safe distance away. (I mean, one of us needs to be able to call 911 if something happens, right?)



I was nervous about the acidity levels even after adding the 2 spoonfuls of lemon juice to each jar and processing them for 20 minutes, but they looked alright. The lids seemed sealed, anyway. In the end, there were no explosions or poisonings, just a tired but triumphant pair of novice canners and 7 jars of preserved tomatoes.



Next up: pickling.