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I guess it was about six years ago when I got it in my head that I wanted to learn how to can. Easier said than done. Granted, I could have spent a weekend in my hometown and learned everything from my mom and granny. Not sure why I didn't go that route. It would have been easier than trekking to eight - eight! - stores in search of canning equipment. After the fifth store, I finally realized that I wasn't going to find mason jars at the mall. Okay, not really, but I would have been wise to have avoided the big box stores and headed straight for the tiny hardware store in my neighborhood first, though. Not only did they have everything I needed, but the 78-year-old store employee who waited on me gave me some lessons. Try getting that at Walmart.

Anyway, in the midst of my quest for canning equipment, I got myself in such a tiz about how this is a dying art, and who's going to keep it alive? All you lazy yuppies with your Smuckers store-bought crap-jam and your fancy green beans without even a trace of botulism bacteria? No! You're going to let it die!

I'll save you, Home Canning!

Once I got home and started actually canning, what with the washing and sterilizing of the jars and lids, and the boiling water, and the peeling of the tomoatoes and the chopping and the heat and the ladling and the third-degree boiling tomato sauce splatter burns on my arms and face and the hours of cleaning and holy shit, how did I manage to get pomegranate juice splatters all the way on the living room ceiling, I finally realized why canning is a dying art:

Because it's hard fucking work, Robin, you dumbass!

And yet, I continue to do it. I cuss the entire time. I slam things. I shake my fist at the tiny little part of my soul that retains a smidge of that Midwestern pioneer farm work ethic, because it's totally screwing things up for my lazy-ass, wimpy urban self. But I do it, because you know what? After it's all said and done, it's really rewarding. I get such a kick out of stacking all those jars and admiring their pretty, yummy contents. I don't even necessarily want to eat them. I just like to look at them, and know that they're mine, from all the women in my family before me.

My mom cans the basics - green beans, tomatoes, and whatever she's grown in her garden. Granny's still a jelly-making machine. That woman can make jelly out of anything. Apples, peaches, blackberries, elderberries, gooseberries, hot peppers, plums, and I can't remember what else.

Aside from putting away some tomatoes and peaches a few years ago out of some misguided sense of duty, I try to do things that are different. Like the cranberry chutney. I made ten jars, and I think that maybe one of them got eaten.

I developed my very own canned salsa recipe, which is damn near the best salsa you'll ever eat. Trust me on this. It's good. When I can salsa, we have to start rationing it around March or April when it looks like we might run out before tomato season.

One year I decided to make pomegranate jelly for Christmas gifts. We'd stopped in Chicago's Indian-Pakistani district on our way home from Michigan at Thanksgiving, where I found cases of pomegranates for some ridiculously low price that I couldn't pass up. Thing is, one can only eat so many pomegranates before they start to turn. You don't want to eat three pomegranates a day, every day. Trust me on this, too. Not that I did that, but it was fear that I might that drove me into jelly-making.

Are you familiar with the structure of pomegranates? Tons of itty bitty teeny tiny little seeds, surrounded by lucious little sacks of juicy delight.

To make pomegranate jelly, one must make pomegranate juice.

That entails removing all those itty bitty teeny tiny fucking little seeds and squeezing the ever-loving life out of them.

Two crates of pomegranates and 20-odd jars of jelly later, my kitchen looked like we'd been butchering beef, or possibly people. Red splatters on the ceiling! Red splatters on the stove! Red splatters on every single kitchen wall! Red rivers on the floor! Red on the dog! Red, red, red everywhere!

Which is the real reason why my kitchen is no longer pale yellow. It's now red, because if you can't scrub the last traces of murder-scene-like jellymaking from the walls, you might as well join 'em.