Canning Season 2019 Begins Today With Cherries

Yesterday Harold and I picked cherries at a friend's farm.  They have many cherry trees and they graciously allow us to pick what we want.  We also got some small cherry trees from them to plant in our own yard, which we did this spring.  Hopefully someday we will have our own cherries to pick (hopefully in my lifetime!).  Meanwhile today I worked with those cherries and began the canning season by canning up 13 jars of my favorite ice cream topping.   The rest of the cherries will be used for a Cherry Crisp for today's lunch dessert and I will freeze plenty for future use in sauces for angel food cake and sponge cake and future crisps. 
     After many years of canning I finally invested in a sturdy, thick bottom, stainless steel canning pot.   Those black and white speckled ones with the corrugated bottom that they usually sell in the stores for canning don't work well on an electric stove, and I usually burn out the bottoms of them in one canning season.   I got tired of always buying new canning pots, so when I found stainless steel ones I was thrilled.   I bought two of them.   I also bought a special canning coil for my electric stove, as I was tired of burning out those thin coils that come with today's electric stoves.   It sits up higher than most coils, and can take the extra weight of a jar-filled canning pot.

The sturdy, thick bottomed, flat bottomed stainless steel canning pot I invested in.  This one has been through 2 years of use already with no signs of wear.  It sits on an extra heavy electric canning coil on the stove that I also bought for canning purposes.  This pot also has a clear lid, so you can easily see what the water and jars are doing during the boiling process.

One of the buckets of cherries we picked yesterday.   Aren't they gorgeous?

After following my recipe for cherry ice cream topping, the cherries look like this.

I got 13 jelly jars of topping from a double recipe!  That's enough for one a month, plus one to spare!

Here is a jar from last year, looking pretty alongside some of my calendula flowers in a bud vase.

Next up on the canning schedule is peaches.   Next week the boxes of canning peaches - Mrs. Smittcamp's Canning Peaches - will be arriving at my local grocery store.  I'll can up 3 or 4 boxes of those.    After that, it will be green beans.  
     If you are interested in the recipe for making cherry ice cream topping, I wrote a blog post about this in July of 2016 called Cherry Time.  You can find it in the blog archives.