Terrifyingly Bored

We canned 26 quarts of green beans today.

If you have ever embarked on this endeavor, you know of what I speak.

Terrifying because of that dang pressure canner.

Boring because you have to wait....and wait.

I don't even own a pressure cooker, because I'm scared of 'em.

Why? Well, my grandmother used them to cook with. However; she'd leave the kitchen and talk on the telephone or whatever, and the next thing you knew there were green beans  hanging from the ceiling.

Things like that scar a person.

The pressure canner we use belonged to my (wait for it) great-grandmother.

She died in 1965. At age 87.

So, the canner has a wee bit of age on it.

Mother says, "I just hold my breath every year and hope it works."

Well, I just hold my breath every year and hope I live through it.

The boring part is waiting for the canner to build up enough steam to put the little thingie on the hole so it can jiggle.  You continue to be bored as you wait for the pressure to get to ten and try to keep it there, juggling the heat of the eye all the time. You have to wait twenty-five minutes after that, turn the heat off the canner, wait for the pressure to go down to zero, open the lid and wait some more until somebody thinks it's safe enough to pick up the hot, hot jars and set them on the towels on the counter.

We did this little process four times today.

We'll have green beans to eat this winter.

And I got sausage, biscuits and a fried egg with homemade blackberry jelly for breakfast.

That was neither terrifying or boring. It was the silver lining of the day.