Tuesday, December 7, 2010

We CAN at School!

How's that for a cheesy title?

I was lucky enough this year to be invited back to the Foods classes at our school to teach a demo lesson on canning. Last year was my first year doing it and we had a lot of fun making grape jelly, pickles and apple pie jam.

This year, there were five classes to prepare for instead of just the three, so I knew I needed to be super prepared and make/bring things that would score big with the kids. Because the recipes were a bit more intensive this year, I was so grateful that the foods teacher worked one step ahead of me and was chopping and preparing the ingredients for the next class while I was teaching.

Like last year we talked about safety, high vs. low acid foods, botulism, so much more, and then walked them through a demonstration. We only had 50 minutes in each class, so this was tight. Here's what we did:

1st period - made grape jelly from concentrated juice and tried some I had already made
2nd period - made banana jam and tasted some I had already made
3rd period - made apple conserve (YUM!) and tried some grape jelly that was already made
4th period - made red onion jelly and tried the banana jam from earlier
6th period - made salsa and tasted salsa I had already made

Like last year, the kids each did their best to out bid each other on the cost of buying jars. I even had one student go as far as to email me to ask if I could get her a jar off campus. Uh, no. What was nice is a student asked if she bought the supplies if I'd help her learn how to can pears after school. We could probably work something out.

I didn't get many pictures, but the school newspaper did, so I'm hopeful to get some of theirs. Here's one I took during a period when I wasn't canning. You can see the jars on the counter from what we'd already done that day.
I did have fun. Each and every jar sealed and is now resting comfortably in my cabinet. I hope I get to do it again next year.

The morning comes early. Sweet gardening dreams.

6 comments:

  1. welll, that's one way to get some canning outta the way!

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  2. How fun to teach canning classes!

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  3. It is so great that your school is willing to teach this. It was covered "back in the day" in our school's Home Ec class but that was a farm town in the 80's , it seems to have fallen out of fashion to even have Home Ec classes much less teach these types of skills - BRAVO!

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  4. How fun! I wish I had learned canning in home ec, might have actually been doing it ever since. Great thing you all are doing!

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  5. Sign me up! That's a class I'd be glad to take. :-) What a great teaching moment and even better way to get some extra canning done.
    I've never heard of banana jam. Is it like a butter (apple butter/pear butter) or is it more like a jelly?

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  6. Thanks, guys! Barbie, banana jam is fantastic. It's not as think as apple butter, but really jam like. There's a recipe on the gardenweb harvest page.

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