Doing the Can-Can

In the NorthtoAK house, we are in full garden harvest mode. Because of the rain and relatively cold season, our usually monstrous garden is not so impressive this year. The raspberries barely covered 32 oz, our zucchini, usually hugely impressive, barely eeked out one little fruit. In fact, the only things that are doing really well are the lavender, mint, and currants.

Yesterday, we spent most of our day canning with bright hopes that they would wind up like our rasberry-almond jam from last year. Canning is always a bit fun because it's a grown-up chemistry experiment laced with quite a bit of danger. This year, we raised the stakes by making mint-jalapeno jelly, mint and rosemary wine jelly, and raspberry-rhubarb jam.

The jam looks pretty good -- maybe not totally solid but certainly jam-ish. However, the mint jellies are liquid, which is a bummer. We might have to do some mint jelly troubleshooting later on today. Otherwise, we will just rename them "sauces" and be done with it.