and let the canning begin

Couple of cooking updates. First was my first ever beer can chicken. I followed the recipe on sorted food (http://sortedfood.com/#!/search/chicken/) and it turned out fairly nicely. The chicken I used was quite a bit larger so in 45 minutes it wasnt completely cooked. The other difference was that my chicken has a hole by the neck so the beer (or in my case pear cider) didnt steam as much as it was supposed to.

The reason for this was that we arranged to get a really nice free range chicken from the St. Lawrence market.

While we were at the market Talia also found that the cucumbers were on sale so she decided she wanted to make some traditional russian pickels. After some excitement with her family and a story about a thumb being cut off she got the recipie. Unfortunately it required a black current leaf... having no place to get black current leaves around us we decided to travel over to my parents who have one in their back yard.

After a quick trip to the fabricland there and a stop for dinner we arrived at my parents to get the leaves... Only to find out that the cherry tree in the front yard was full of tasty sour cherries and my parents were away at the cottage. At this point we decided to pick them before the birds got to them all.

After spending a while pitting them I ended up which a nice batch of cherries. These badboys got processed into a cherry pie filling which is currently still processing but I do have some picks. The recipe I used came from here (http://www.simplebites.net/summer-canning-series-cherry-pie-filling-recipe/)

On a side note, last Thursday my parents came over to drop off a large batch of red currents that my Mom had picked. I spent Thursday night cleaning them with my Mom and them froze them for when I had a chance to make them today.

I modified this recipe (http://foodpreservation.about.com/od/Preserves/r/Red-Currant-Jam-Recipe.htm) because I had more red currents. Despise starting with 1.3 kg of currents I ended up only with 3 small jars of current jam.

~(' ')~