It’s always this time of year that my inner chipmunk starts
getting restless- the last of the local produce has all but disappeared, and
the chipmunk part of me starts frantically looking for things it can store away
for the winter. I know this is silly. Unless the apocalypse shows up I’ll have
no problem finding food through the winter, but it’s still an instinctual urge
I have to indulge.
So, for the first time ever, I am attempting canning. My
mother used to can tomatoes every year, usually enough to last much further
than through the winter, and I vaguely remember helping her, the general
process of sterilizing jars and filling them with goopy tomato sauces, then
reboiling the filled jars. But I’d never attempted the full process myself
until now, so I figured I’d better read up on the details. Following a mix of
instructions from several different recipes, I decided to pickle cranberries. I
filled each jar with fresh cranberries, then poured a boiling mixture of
vinegar, water, brown sugar, sage, and orange zest over top. Out of eight jars,
seven of them gave the correct “ping” noise as they cooled after the second
boiling, showing that they sealed correctly. The eighth is in the fridge,
waiting to be tested in a few days. I expect the pickled cranberries to come
out much like an unsweetened cranberry sauce, and am looking forward to trying
it on turkey sandwiches, cheese platters, and in other sauces. The one problem
with pickling, especially for the impatient inner chipmunk, is that you must
wait at least a couple days to see how it turned out: if I got something
horribly wrong, the entire batch will be rather worthless, and I’ll have to
start the entire process over. If they turn out well, half of my shiny little
jars will be sent out to family as a small consolation for my absence this
Thanksgiving (I’ll be working), and the rest shall be happily consumed by
myself, throughout the winter and most likely into the spring. 
