Canning: An Endangered Species We Should 'Preserve'

Canning...  What Alabamian doesn't have a childhood memory of their granny standing over a pressure cooker preparing us for a winter's worth of delicious southern food?  These women deserve a dang medal!!!  Standing there in their finest housecoat over a potential bomb that Syrian rebels would be proud of, they worked to make sure we'd have some good fixins'!  Being born & bread in Chilton County, peach marmalade is my favorite selection in the array of delicacies that have always been lovingly stored in my granny's kitchen.  And for those of you who were abused as children and have no idea what I'm talking about, here's the 'official' definition of canning:

Canning is a method of preserving food in which the food contents are processed and sealed in an airtight container. Canning provides a shelf life typically ranging from one to five years, although under specific circumstances it can be much longer.

And forgive me if I use a little creative freedom with the word canning because I use it for pretty much everything my granny has ever done to preserve food for us.  Like Forest Gump & all the creative ways he used shrimp, our ancestors were just as inventive! They'd can it, they'd freeze it... So you could heat it, you could fry it, you could boil it, you could bake it...

Quite honestly, I've never been one to cook much. I surely never appreciated my granny's canning superpowers!  You could mention canning to me and I'd suddenly have 5 million things that had to be done right then!  But I really just detested the thought of shucking corn & snapping peas & all that entailed.  However,  I am observant & about a year ago I began to notice my baby sister doing a lot of grocery shopping at granny's house...  Never one to pass up a good thing, I began to pay a little more attention to this whole canning phenomenon.

I'll be damned if she wasn't on to something....

This afternoon, I went 'grocery shopping' at granny's house.  Accompanied by my sister who has become a canning connoisseur, we plundered thru her pantry & deep freeze like archaeologists on a dig.  I now have fresh corn, squash, chopped squash with onions, sweet pickles, peach marmalade, okra, & some kind of pear relish that makes me nervous but granny sold it like a champ.  But my greatest find was her vegetable soup.  I swear she could be the next Paula Deen with some of her cookin'.  That vegetable soup is national championship contending good.

As I got home tonight & began putting away my 'groceries', temptation got the best of me & I forced open the can of pickles.  While I was enjoying those sweet & tangy morsels, I got kinda sad.  Who the heck cans anymore?  I surely don't.  Give me a pressure cooker and a video camera & you've got your next post on one of those gore sites because I'd surely lose a pretty important body part.

I get so frustrated with some of my grandparent's antiquated ways.  Just once, I wish I could text her because I despise talking on the phone!  And how nice would it be to send her an email so she could read some of my blog posts?  My granny may not embrace some of the technology that is so second nature to us, but she sure knows how to can.  And it's sad to think that the next generation won't even know what that means....

My granny... Master canner... Master mother... Master granny... Master woman...

Roll Tide!!!  Roll Granny!!!