This is going to be easier than I thought

Rich cleaned out some bookshelves over the weekend (oy, huge mess in the living room for a few hours). After going through the giant stack he pulled out, he came in and deposited a stack of those Sunset-type books—you know, the big, thin paperbacks that were always some kind of How To guide or basic reference books—on my desk. They were mostly about gardening (flower, bulb, vegetable) and houseplants, but there were a few about canning, pickling and the like. (Apparently we had some big plans in self-sufficiency when we first met, though it could also be that the books were just on sale. At the time, neither of us could much resist a marked-down book.)

One of them was 12 Months Harvest, an interesting book about—duh—preserving food. And making cheese, soap and bread (delicious together) as well as covering a few other Foxfire-type subjects. (It was published in the hippie-dippie 70s, so that might be rather shaping my impression of it.)

Since I've made a tiny little foray into the world of preserving food (boiled cider, aka apple molasses and freezer strawberry jam), I've kind of gotten the bug. I asked for and received a canning starter kit (I had to borrow from Rich's friend Ron to put up the boiled cider), so now I'm really ready to get going. And this is Autumn! It's harvest season. There should be lots of stuff to preserve!

Yeah. I'm still thinking about it.

There is one thing I'm definitely going to try, though. In that stack of books there was also a copy (a hard back copy) of Better Homes and Gardens Home Canning Cook Book. That one contains a recipe that solves a forty-year conundrum for me. When I was in high school (circa the dawn of time), my cousin Mike and his Massachusetts-born wife Kathy gave my parents a jar of cranberry jelly. This is not the same stuff you serve with turkey at Thanksgiving. It's actual jelly, made to spread on toast. It was delicious. I ate it every morning until it was gone. And there was no more.

Now, children, keep in mind this was long before the Innerwebs existed. All I could do in those primitive times was keep an eye out in the grocery store, and hope that my travels might one day take me through cranberry jelly country. Many years passed, and the IETF fellows put together the Internet thing. I used it to search for cranberry jelly. I found (and tried) jam, preserves, spreadable fruit…but nothing was ever exactly right.

Somehow it never occurred to me to look for a recipe for it. The Home Canning Cook Book has one. It's complicated and exotic, requiring many ingredients and painstakingly precise chemistry: You boil cranberry juice cocktail and sugar, add pectin and put it in jars. Whew!

So soon I'll once again have cranberry jelly on my toast. And someone will, no doubt, be getting some via the Homemade Christmas Gift Grab Bag. That makes the book mess all worthwhile, I guess. Who knows? Maybe I'll even try a little soap to go with it.