Tuesday, wherein I both whine and crow. A bit of Earth Tribal News, and Torts, too!

Poko and her baby, Dusty, share a meal of roses.

Churchy's little tail

Thrilling "Tribal News" from yesterweek:

Friday the Thirteenth came on a Tuesday this month!

You will remember that I picked prickly pears on Friday last week.

I did some of this canning stuff wrong, apparently, by flipping the jars upside down but no worries.  I snapped at DH and paid for it PDQ when I burnt my thumb on the boiling water bath.  But!

But if it all JELLS,  I will be so very happy indeed!   I'll be dancing in the kitchen! Will this serve for the 13th day of August Happiness Challenge?  My happiness was challenged!

Saturday we cleaned the pears of most of the thorns.   I also peeled, cut up, and ground up these fierce fruits, and put that goop into the Fridge with a lid on it so it could not get out in the night and reek havoc about the place! 

Sunday,  and I added stuff, cooked, cooled, and stored the goop until Monday, satisfied that it was good and DEAD!

This is a mishmash of pictures over many days, some were on the phone cam.  sheesh

Four of these, full of those (below).

Each of those 50 some little "tunas" (Actually, I think of them more as PUMAS.  Dear God they are fierce !) got pealed and chopped.
I spent the evening on Friday picking little thorns out of my finger with a pair of tweezers,
while wearing an Optivisor, to find the tiny beasts.
  I cannot stress enough, WEAR STEEL TIPPED LEATHER GLOVES FOR THE PICKING AND PEALING PARTS!

Sunday,  I think, I added a whole tray of frozen lime juice from our trees, plus four cups of sugar, and boiled all this for 12 minutes.
After letting it cool down, it went into the fridge for the night, absolutely, completely DEAD!

Monday, I boiled it again, for another 10 minutes, just for fun, no really I had to get the pectin into it.  I added 3 and a half tablespoons of pectin.  This !@#!*$&# stuff had better JELL!

I filled the jars and sealed them, then flipped them over just like about half the people in the world do- those in Europe who went through two world wars and the great famine and that should count for something, right?  They should know what they are doing?  Yes?
Then I got exceedingly worried.  The other half of "canning world" nixed this as a proper seal, plus some of them said flipping the jars bottom up could "break the Gel"  Yikes! 
Anyway,  I fell back onto my mother's tomato canning methods, sure, by now, that I had "Broken the Gel",  Mon Dieu!  Sad really. 
After ALL The work and the ANGST!  It's not like I had never canned before, I had, I've done a lot of it!  I blame the web, and that wicked Opuntia!

In the jars went to be boiled yet again! 
Not having a proper water bath canning outfit I had to rely on Luck and the Virgin Mary (no I really mean that) to keep the jars from blowing up as, I HAD NO RACK! 
The online sites said to use a rack to keep the jars from blowing up!
I sat in the other room, but close enough to hear anything happening, and waited for the sound of disaster.   After 10 more minutes in an amazingly HOT, rolling boil (that in itself made me feel like a wizard but the fairly massive stove burner deserves the credit) the jars all came through just fine.

This time I was satisfied that there was no microbe Known to Science, NONE, that could have lived through what I'd put those pears through.
I am firmly in the water bath school, or TRIBE, which ever the case may be.

There really is something so very "Tribal" about canning your own Stuff!   All the jars sealed, and I could hear the pings all the way in here from the kitchen with the fan blowing in my ear.   Did I mention that my hearing has returned? 

The reason that there are fewer jars than you might expect from all those prickly pears is that you can't use ALL of a fruit unless you use the "Blowtorch tribal methods" described HERE.  I may have put that link up already but it really is a pretty blog post, not so unruly as is mine.  If you read this far, I congratulate you on your stamina!

With a blowtorch, you get off nearly all the thorns, and the skin comes off very thinly, and therefore, much more of the flesh of the pear  stays With it.  And, as an added bonus, the men of the family think it's a very cool tribal method, indeed.  If memory serves, you just try getting so much as a finger on that blowtorch yourself! 

Also, there is another reason:  since it was in the afternoon, I was in my "blind as a bat" state.  This meant that I couldn't tell there was actually a LID on a storage container that was set before me.  Half a big jar of juice went all over the counter top, down the cabinets and onto the floor.  This almost caused me to flip out and decide to go cut that  @$#%^& Opuntia down with the pruning saw, and just BE DONE WITH IT FOREVER!

If my jam doesn't jell, it will make one heck of a Tequila Sunrise, eh?  I'm not cooking it again.  I'll just freeze it and eat it like popsicles.

Tally ho, EarthTribe!  Have a very good time this week!