Soup Nazi Time

There are a few things I cook really well. Considering a few years ago I used my oven to store gift wrap and bows, saying that is a huge accomplishment. Soup has become one of my specialty items and I have so much fun creating new ones. This summer I was on a bit of a squash kick. I made about five different kinds of squash soups and even tried a gazpacho. Now that summer is winding down I'm making some vegetable soup with some finds from the farmer's market. Today I used some silver queen corn, tomatoes, green beans and some shelled beans the market was offering. I tossed in a few things from the fridge and voila...SOUP!

   
It's still in the upper 80's during the day, but the evenings are cooling off nicely. The cooler it gets the more soup I make.

What do I do with it all?

My husband is an anti-vegetable kind of guy. He'll eat potatoes...maybe a green bean or two every few months and he'll have a standard side salad. My friends seem to benefit the most from my soup making. I love sharing it.

I would love to learn how to can and preserve the soup for the pantry so I can save more of it from myself. I'd love to try my hand and making pickles and pickling various vegetables that are suddenly more popular when pickled (okra and asparagus come to mind). It would be great to eat those summer farmer's market vegetables year round. It would also make it easier to justify buying a bigger haul from the local stands.

Sadly, I'm discovering that canning is a dying art form. When society started eating crap and stopped growing food, no one bothered to learn how to can. I remember my neighbors and some of my older aunts canning a few times a year. These canned goods practically turned into currency later on. I remember my father doing favors for the elderly neighbor to score some of her canned cherry peppers.

There is a ton of information on canning online. It just isn't the same. I wish I lived closer to my aunts and some of my older cousins who still can from time to time. I want to be able to learn a skill from an older person and then teach it to someone else.

There's so much more to canning than what can be pulled from YouTube or local farmer co-op websites. There's a lot of skill involved. Canning isn't just something you can try doing. It really takes an investment of time and money in addition to the fact you can actually kill people (or make them VERY sick) if you don't do it right. The goods aren't very expensive but there are some specialty items that are essential that probably can't be used for much else. The technique is the tricky part. You have to follow very specific instructions based on the acid content of what your preserving. Some things require being boiled in a water bath and other items require a pressure cooker. I know what you're thinking! Who the heck uses a pressure cooker in midtown Atlanta? I've been around few pressure cookers in my life. My mother would chase me out of the kitchen when she was using it in case it exploded. So now I am pondering buying one (who the heck knows where to find one around here) and jumping into this canning project. I'll keep you posted.