i am not a canning person

My summer canning marathon is over, and I now remember how much I do not like canning. I forgot in the eleven months since my last canning marathon. Mostly because those months were accented by yummy canned goods: sweet cucumber relish folded into salads, cardamom plum jam smeared on toast, tomato sauce spooned over pasta. My efforts last summer, which included one epic weekend where I think I did seven different canning projects, were, okay, totally worth it. We gave pickles and jam as Christmas gifts and brought them as host gifts, shared them with family and friends, and just finished the last jam a few weeks ago.

This weekend, while Tim was across the country for a friend's wedding, I decided to revisit some highlights--hot-cumin zucchini pickles, dilly beans, and sweet cucumber relish--as well as some sweet cucumber pickles that our landlords served once and I've been dreaming about ever since. I made it to the jar-filling stage of my first project, the relish, when it all flooded back. Oh no, I do not like canning at all. It's the water-bath canner on the stove hissing hurry up as I pack the jars; the millions of precise steps in the recipes shouting you forgot, you forgot; the sneaky jar lifter slipping its grip and whooping ha!; the heat in the kitchen stickying my skin. 

Maybe I spent too much time with canning equipment this weekend. 

As I relayed my frustrations to Tim on the phone midway through the marathon, he said, "Maybe you are not a canning person." And something clicked for me. I actually felt relieved. He is right. I am not a canning person. 

Sure, I will probably continue to make a few small batches of pickles and dilly beans and relish each summer. How can you not when you have eleven pounds of cucumbers languishing in the fridge? I will probably try new canning recipes, too, because I always fall for the romance of new recipes and home-preserved self-sufficiency. Come rainy November, I will definitely be delighted to crunch into a dilly bean and might even feel nostalgic for steamy nights spent slaving over the stove with tools that seem less anthropomorphic after a few months of separation. 

But I am pretty sure that we are fermenting people. It's not just that fermenting is less work--you throw things in jars with water and maybe salt, check on them every evening or so, and let the microbes pull the weight. It's that fermenting seems looser and more forgiving to me, in my experience. Instead of trying to nuke all the microbes, good and bad, out of a jar and hope for a sterile environment, you nurture the right microbes so that they can demolish the bad ones. If mold grows on top, you skim it off. Not a big deal. And then you get to eat the good microbes, which do good upon good in your gut. 

I could wax scientific, thanks to the fantastic fermentation guide I copyedited this summer (Fermentation and Home Brewing: The Ultimate Resource), but no. I'm going to go put my feet up and eat some ice cream. It's recovery time.