We Can!

My mom, sister, and I can.  We can tomato sauce, jam, pickles, jalapenos, and last year, even eggs!  It's super fun, and not really hard if you have all of the equiment ready to go!
You need a few things to can successfully.  In this picture is a jar lifter, a wand to get the lids out of the hot water, and a funnel for getting the jam into the jars.  The West Ladies love their lid wands.  If you want some joy, google the West Ladies.  They also think wooden spoons are "a blessin'"  I agree.

My mom, sister and I like kitchen gadgets. Jenny likes new ones like you'd see on the food network.  My mom likes older ones that kind of look antique, especially rolling pins.  One time we saw old rolling pins displayed in a wine rack.  Not big wine drinkers, my mom and I bought the "rolling pin holder" and 5 antique rolling pins.  I'm not exactly sure when it was that we realized there probably was no thing as a rolling pin holder.

You'll need a mom to hold your baby and wear a sweet canning shirt.  You also need a big canning pot with a can lifter/rack thing.  Fill it about 1/2 full and heat that water up!

We made strawberry jam, so we crushed and measured out 8 cups of strawberries.  I like jam thicker, so I left some big chunks in there!

Can you see that sugar in the background?  You need to measure out 3 and 3/4 cups of sugar and put it in a bowl.  In a smaller bowl, combine one package fruit pectin and 1/4 cup of sugar  (that's 4 cups sugar for those of you good at fractions, and this was the reduced sugar pectin recipe!)
While doing all of this, put your clean empty jars in the hot water.

In another big pot on the stove, put in the 8 cups strawberries and the 1/4 cup sugar/pectin mixture and bring it to a rolling boil.  Take the jars out of the hot water.  In a separate bowl or sauce pan, warm up the lids (not the rings) but don't boil them.
When the strawberry mixture reaches a rolling boil, add the big bowl of sugar in, stir it, and bring it to a rolling boil again.  After it boils for one minute, turn off the heat, ladle into hot jars leaving 1/8 inch of space on top, put on a lid, and screw a ring on tightly. 

Return all jars to canning pot, lift the rack and lower it to the bottom of the pot, and boil for 10 minutes.  This is called processing.  After ten minutes, use the can lifter to take them out to cool!  You can tell if the jars are sealed by pushing in the middle of the lids after a few hours.  If they pop back up, they aren't sealed and you better put those in the fridge and use right away.

Beautiful!