So often over the life of this blog, I’ve written about beautiful cookbooks. These posts are fun for me to write because I love any excuse to sit awhile with a new cookery volume and explore what it has to offer. Many of you take the time to write me an email or leave a comment, to tell me how useful you find these cookbook pieces, because they give you a chance to peek inside a book in a way that’s different from the experience on Amazon.
Today’s cookbook feature is a particularly unique joy, because this time, I’m sharing my own book
. Now, I realize that I’ve been talking about this book for many, many weeks now. Thing is, for all that excited chatter, I haven’t taken much of a chance to tell you what you’ll find when you open the cover and why it might be a good canning book for you.
To my mind, the book is a tangible embodiment of this website. It brings together the most popular recipes from the archives as well as a number of new recipes you’ve never seen before. All the previously-published recipes were retested and rewritten before being included in the manuscript to ensure that they were the best versions of themselves. Many were also scaled down to yield just three or four pints, to keep with the small batch theme.
It includes detailed canning instructions (with helpful instructional pictures!), tips on how to determine whether your jam has reached its set point, a guide for adjusting processing time for altitude and all the best safety practices.
The recipes are sorted by genre, so that all the pickles are in one chapter, jellies in another and so on. Within each section, the recipes are arranged by season, so that each spring, you can start at the beginning of the jam chapter and then work your way through to the end.
The book is also full of really gorgeous images. Truly, my jars have never looked better. The photography was done by Steve Legato, at his Philadelphia studio, and it was such a pleasure to watch him work. Also, I made all the canned goods pictured, so you can trust that your finished products should look pretty darn close to what you see.
Another way I tried to keep the book tied closely to this site is that it’s not just about canning. Towards the back of the book, you’ll find sections devoted to nut butters, granolas, bread and scone mixes in jars and even flavored salts. There’s also information about how to best freeze different fruits and vegetables, and some details on pressure canning low acid foods.
Finally, the reason I think so many of you will like the book is that it’s me. It’s my voice, the same one you read here day after day. I’m always working to write about food preservation in a way that conveys the fact that it’s a joy, not a chore. That feeling ribbons throughout the book. I love joining so many of you in your kitchens through this blog and I hope I’ll get to do the same through the book.
Thanks to my kind publicist at Running Press, I have three copies of the Food in Jars (the cookbook) to give away to Food in Jars (the blog) readers. Here’s what to do:
- To enter the giveaway, leave a comment on this post and share your favorite kind of food in jars. Jam? Jelly? Pickles? Chutney? Canned peaches? Granola? Iced coffee? There is no wrong answer.
- Comments will close at 11:59 pm eastern time on Sunday, May 27, 2012. Winner will be chosen at random (using random.org) and will be posted to the blog on Monday, May 28, 2012.
- Giveaway is open to U.S. and Canadian readers.
- One entry/comment per person, please.
If you can’t bear to wait and see if you win the giveaway, you can always order a copy by clicking here: Food in Jars: Preserving in Small Batches Year-Round.
I love pickles! I remember helping my grandmother make pickles, jams and jellies. <3
My favorite thing to can is orange and cranberry jam. This looks like an awesome book! Congratulations on your publication!!!
Iced Coffee for sure 🙂
Jams of all kinds are my favorite.
my favorite thing to can is applebutter. Everyone loves home-made applebutter and i love to smell it cooking..mmmmmm!
I think the greatest thing to ever come out of a jar is salsa (followed closely by Nutella). What I want to do and learn is how to do dry soup mixes. I’ll be living on my own soon and this would really help me with eating right, so I hope I win!
I love pickling items the best and also salsa. Nothing feels better than seeing rows of harvest gatehring on your shelves. I’d Love to win this book, thanks for the chance.
I love all sorts of things in jar, but my favorite, because it’s what started me preserving, is tomatoes (sauce, whole, chopped).
This cook book looks original and full of new, energetic recipes. My favorite thing in a jar would have to be fruit juices. It was very hard to decide on one, though 🙂 May you have a very blessed and enjoyable Memorial Day Weekend.
I love making apple and pear butter, and fig and pear jam and preserves
Either jelly or pickles. I need them both.
I have a soft spot for everything in jars, but I think my favorite and most used is Tea!
Mustards, pickles, jams & jellies, tomato sauces are all wonderful, but must admit that chutneys are my favorite. A spoon, a jar, and I’m smiling. 🙂
I love Jams and Jellies!!! Not only on breads, but I use to marinade meats and incorporate in my baking. I would love to try the many recipes in this book. They look yummy. Thanks Sally
Apple Butter, Pickles, frozen drinks…..really there is no way to choose one!! Cant wait to get your book whether won or purchased!! 🙂
I love to cook and I love to can and I have been doing both for over 40 years now….I learned from my great grandmother (who was born in 1875). I love to put up jams and pickles, especially with food that I have grown myself. My son is also carrying on the heritage, and that makes me proud too. I bet that he’s got a comment in here also trying to get a free copy of the book!
My favorite food in jars is jams/jellies, pickles, & if course, iced coffee!! I am rather new to canning and would LOVE LOVE LOVE to have a copy of this book so I can become an expert and share what I learn with others!! 😉
My favorite jarred food that I have to have in my fridge is chutney. We make our own, and have made a variety depending on what’s available when we run out. For a few years we made kiwi chutney because my mom’s brother was growing them at the time and would send us a box-full – we had to do something with them!
My favorite canned item is blueberry jam soooo good!!!
My favorite food in a jar? The grilled pickles I recently made. Not because I like pickles- I don’t, actually… but because they were so much fun to make! And everyone loved them!
strawberry-rhubarb jam!
Mango salsa and any kind of pickles 🙂
soup any kind will do
I love jams!! i just tried strawberry balsamic jam….love!!
My favorite food in jars is my slow cooker apple butter– it is a big hit not only in our house but with friends and family as well.
What a beautiful cookbook!
My favorite thing to can is applesauce. My grandsons love it and I use it in cakes as well.
My FAVORITE thing is a jar is apple butter! Pickled zucchini chips are a close second.
Pickled anything. 🙂
I love canning salsa and pickles. The book looks Awesome!!
Jam in jars, also syrup of any kind!
Carol
I love canning pickles, especially sour ones!
Absolutely no doubt that peach salsa is my favorite here in the Heart of Dixie.
Thanks! Virginia
Strawberry jam is one of my favorites. My boys loved canned pears.
I don’t have a lot of experience at canning (yet) with the exception of making jam. I’d like to be more adventurous and your book looks like just the tool I need. Congratulations on your new book. I wish you lots of success.
I’ve followed your blog for awhile and love all the tips and techniques you share. Unfortunately I’m not very “computer literate” so we’ll see if my post takes this time. Your cookbook looks absolutely wonderful. Congratulations! We love to can stewed tomatoes, pickles, beans, salsa, and anything else that presents itself abundently in the garden! I’ll let you in on a sad experience…the best lettuce we’ve ever grown came up from volunteers dumped in the garden from our patio pots of lettuce. This spring lettuce was GEORGEOUS and delicious! Guess the lesson is we tend to plant too dense; fewer seeds make better plants ? LOL
I love anything that brings the fresh tastes of summer into my kitchen in the dead of winter. Be it opening a jar of salsa, tomato sauce, canned tomatoes, jam, or fruit butter. It brings me back to summer and the process of growing, harvesting, preparing and preserving. I love venturing down to my basement to admire my trove of canning goodness.
My favorite food in jars: the sliced bread-and-butter cucumber pickles my parents made together every year. Our entire backyard was a vegetable garden my father planted every year, and canning was one of my parents’ favorite shared rituals as a couple. Every summer and fall our kitchen would be crammed with blue-green Ball glass Mason jars and the mysterious appliance known as a pressure cooker. These sweet-and-sour ‘cukes’ were one of my parents’ favorite recipes, and mine too. I can still taste the mustard seed; sometimes I even drank the liquid when no one else was looking.
Rhubarb syrup! Making a batch next weekend. Kids love my applesauce 🙂
I loved having canned tomatoes so much better tasting than from the store! 🙂
I have never canned or jarred before. I’ve wanted to, but just never took the initiative. I own a small pot and jar holder with some half pint jars and lids that my wife has used to make blackberry jam. I was looking at rhubarb recipes on the web (as I have way too much rhubarb – six plants and was sick of the usual rhubarb pies and crisps) and came across your rhubarb chutney recipe. It sounded so good that I had to try it out. Your recipe made it look so easy. It was indeed! I ended up with four half pint jars of the chutney. One was used to go with grilled pork tenderloin. So very good! So thank you for making my first time experience a pleasant one. I will be making more Food In Jars soon.
Love, love, love jams and marmalades.
Some kind of butter, pear butter, apple butter, etc. Mmmm.
I look forward to meeting you next month when I take your class at Delancey! Will you be bringing books to sell/sign?
I love making big batches of tomatillo salsa.
Favorite thing…..pepper jelly. The book looks Amazing – the pictures are gorgeous!
I am glad I found your blog. My husband is deployed and I am planning to do some canning so I can send him some home-cooked meals. I have a feeling your info/experience will be a big help.
My mom cans and I love her salsa and jams and jalapeños. The only things I’ve done so far are zucchini bread and birthday cake (both to send to my husband), but I plan to remedy that soon!
My favorite food in jars is the last thing I put up into a jar. I love listening to the ping when the jar seals, I love wiping off the jars (which is actually just an excuse to admire the contents), I really love when my kids ask me to send them home with a jar. I’ve even had my nephew ask me to mail them to Korea!
My all time favorite is picked pears but I have developed a new love for homemade applesauce – soooooo much better than the stuff from the store! I want to make strawberry jam and can some cherries this year but unfortunately, the prices are still way to high!
Going into my second summer cannon, And My favorite and that of all my friends so far has been the zesty zucchini relish from the Ball complete book of home preserving. Can’t make enough of the stuff!
I think my favorite would have to be jam. I love chopping up mountains of ripe fruit, the gorgeous sensory experience of making jam, and also the many months of popping open lovely jars of goodness for my family or having something sweet to give away.
I love making pickled/dilled green beans, and fruit preserves great to open up in the dead of winter or any time.
We can pickled veggies every summer and i love cutting the carrots and bean evenly, stacking them in the jar alongside brussel sprouts, cauliflower and garlic in a way that makes them jars of art on our shelves – bonus that they taste amazing and we eat practically fresh veggies all year around!
My favorite is any type of jam, jelly or butter. 🙂 They are so absolutely tasty when made at home.
Its nice to have a peek inside! Looks like a fun read as well as useful. My favorite to can is salsa, just used the last jar today, darn, we’ll have to wait a few months before the new batch is made.
I remember putting up fruit, jams, and pickles (among other things) with my mom when I was young. I particularly liked making raspberry jam. 😀
I have been wanting to start canning again because I like to control my ingredients. My fiancee (boyfriend at the time of purchase) bought me a starter kit last Christmas.
There is a funny story attached. He began talking about Christmas and my gift last September, building it up for 4 months. Christmas morning came, and I had this feeling he was going to propose. The last gift I opened that morning was the canning set. It was all I could do to not appear disappointed. Here I was, expecting a ring, and opened a canning set. I remember him talking about the store offering free classes and so on. I finally asked him which of my gifts he’d been talking about… and that was when he proposed.
I will never forget opening that canning set. I do love it, and am thrilled to have it. It makes me laugh to remember my reaction and the look of worry on his face.
Pickles, yep, any kind of pickle, sweet, sour, dill, hot……… Pickles!!!
For me, it is a toss-up between pickles (of any variety) and apple butter. I do love pickles, but I put apple butter on everything from turkey sandwiches to yogurt to granola!
I have only made yogurt in jars so far, but am hoping to learn ways to better utilize the Mason in my home.
I love to make pickles. I by fresh cucumbers in the spring and summer at our local market and use my own fresh dill and hot peppers to make a zesty sandwich addition.
I love Strawberry Jam and my apple butter!
This is hard, because there’s so many goodies in jars! We can a lot of chicken, which makes the BEST chicken salad. But that’s not my favorite. We can a LOT of green beans, which taste so good in the winter. But as much as I love them, it’s not my favorite. I think canned peaches is my favorite!
Your cookbook looks beautiful! I don’t do much canning yet, but would love to do more! I would love to can tomato sauce. I’ve made freezer jam before and it was delicious! That rhubarb syrup looks wonderful!
My favourite food-in-jars is a bit of a toss-up…
I like garlic-dill pickles (cucumbers AND asparagus) as well as red wine pickled turnips.
But I also like sourcherry jam (which makes for lovely tarts), port-apple jelly (lovely on turkey or winter squash), and cranberry curd (ditto, also good on waffles and scones).
I like sumac-raspberry lemonade, balsamic-fig chutney (delicious with chevre or roast pork) and tomato-peach salsa.
So many tasty things. I’m not narrowing it down any further than that.
TTFN,
Meliad.
It’s a toss up between jam and pickles!
I love chutney! And salsa. And jam. So many good options!
Oh, I would love to win this! I really enjoy your recipes and the way you describe the steps you took to create whatever you’re working on, so I bet the book will be just lovely.
I have several favourite things in cans… the first is pickled beans, made entirely from beans and herbs from our garden. I love them because my husband loves them so much, and I feel so useful and clever for having made something so simple yet delicious out of things that grew a few steps from our back door.
My personal favourite thing is blueberry jam/sauce/compote/whatever it’s locally called. I’m allergic to citrus, so a lot of commercially made jams are out of the question for me. Anything with lemon juice is a no-no, so I often have to use vinegar instead to get the right level of acidity. I’m actually not all that fond of the intense sugar in most jams, so a bit of vinegar helps to balance things, flavour-wise, for me. Blueberry jam with a bit of ginger and red wine vinegar on a biscuit slathered in butter – oh yum! Blueberry anything is delicious!
My favo(u)rite food from a jar is the Conway Chutney my parents make every year, passed down from my paternal grandmother and her sisters. It isn’t remotely spicy, I think what it really is is what we call ‘ketchup aux fruits’ here in Quebec, but it tastes nothing like any other ‘ketchup aux fruits’ I’ve ever tasted. It is terrific with shepherd’s pie, meat pies and Tourtiere. Mixed with shrimp, mayo, curry powder and cream cheese, it makes a tasty dip as well!
Congratulations on your new book! I have a passion for chutney and make all sorts. This year it is going to be apricot and dates! Good luck to everyone! Pamela
If I had to choose, I guess I’d say my favorite is just good old strawberry jam. It makes everyone in my house happy!
Congrats Marisa!!! I cannot wait to own this book! If I don’t win a copy, I’m ordering one straightaway 😀 Everything looks gorgeous, and I’m so happy for you!
I love cake in jars 🙂 But if we’re talking longevity, I’ve loved strawberry jam in jars since I can remember.
Thank you for a lovely book! I found you through All Buttoned Up, who probably needs a copy sent directly to her more than I do!!
I love having canned tomatoes on hand at all times!
Peaches because that’s what I had as a kid and idnlike to learn to do for my kids.
Hello! I love canning apple cider syrup, since I saw your recipe on your blog before the holidays last year. Syrups, jams, and preserves are my favorite to learn!
My fav food in jars is homemade jam! Pretty soon I’m going to try vacuum-packed salad in jars – can’t wait to see how that turns out!
I love your blog – it has been inspirational! I have always wanted to can, but never did because of batch sizes. Your small batch canning is what has helped me get over my fears! THANK YOU! If I don’t win the book, I will most likely buy it! My fingers are crossed! Thanks for the opportunity!
I’m torn between good old fashioned strawberry jam and fruit chutneys. Last year I made some peach chutney with dried cherries. Added to simple grilled meats, it’s like dinner in a jar and is great for busy days. But strawberry jam in the middle of the winter is magic. So I guess strawberry jam is my favorite food in a jar. Thanks for the giveaway and congrats on the beautiful book.
Pickled vegetables, peaches, blackberry jam…..lots of “favorites”
if you asked me yesterday, it’d be pickles. but today, my new favorite might be rhubarb syrup. that stuff is amazing.
Jam- peach, strawberry, rhubarb and beyond! I look forward to exploring with Food in Jars. Yummy!
I love almost anything in jars, but my favorite is raspberries put up with minimal sweetener, a mixture of honey and agave nectar. Can’t wait to read the new cookbook.
Strawberry – Pinot Noir Jam
My favorite food in jars has to be pickled beets, a lunch-time staple for me!
I love to make bread and butter – cuke and LOTS OF ONION pickles. The onions go in fresh cut and stay crunchy after the canning process. I just love them and always get asked for more hand outs!
Love canned salsa.
This book would so help me in finding healthy foods we love to have but no longer buy because of ingredients not condusive to our health journey. Hope I win!
My favorite would be strawberry jam!
My favorite food in jars is anything I put there because that means I know where it came from and how it got there.
Congratulations! Canned fruits, for sure. 🙂
Pickled cauliflower is by far my favourite thing in a jar. Yummer.
I’m a jam & pickle maker. Or have been. That and tomatoey things, bbq sauces, chutneys. Yeah, I have the bug. Thing about your book…man, anybody could read this and be cool and calm and come out with an excellent product. I’m unsystematically making recipes in the book. Started off with Cantaloupe Jam (WhoA! HO! HA!). Then made the Zucchini-Pepper Relish (which we tried – and devoured – this afternoon, with our organic uncured hot dogs) and Blackberry Jam. I have over an acre of wild blacks, so, I make a lot of jam. I decided to try your recipe, just to see. (I’d never used pectin.) This week, I’ve ordered a bushel of peaches from a farmer at the farmers market. Guess what I’m gonna be makin’ on Thursday night?
rhubarb jam!!! iced coffee/iced tea, apple butter, orange marmalade, the list goes on & on…. congratulations on your book!
peanut butterrrrrr! homemade!
I love my strawberry rhubarb jam, also I make a pretty good orange grapefruit marmalade.
My husband and I canned 19 quarts of chicken stock this winter, that was a project!
I really love the cherry jam we made last time. Lately I’ve been attempting to make water kefir.
so fun! jam & preserves are my fave. particularly your strawberry vanilla jam :o) i really want to try chutney next.
Looking forward to making homemade sweet pickles! The cucumber plants are looking good. My deviled eggs, chicken salad, and tater salad will be awesome with them. This book would be very helpful and a lot of fun. Hope I win! Best wishes to you.
I think it has to be leftovers. I just love putting things in jars in general, and leftovers get a lot of love from me.
strawberry jam! just found your website while googling for info on canning in weck jars. thanks for the info and the jam looks beautiful in the jars!
Such a beautiful looking book.
I’ve just started making rhubarb jam, and I suddenly can’t live without it.
x charlotte
Anything pickled! Already have my copy of the cookbook, but would love to give one to my mom.
Pickles! These were my first real attempt at canning – yum!
My favorite homemade food in jars are liqueurs, pear brandy, lemon cello, and rhubarb liqueur are my current favorites.