Pearfectly Delicious!

One of the wonderful characteristics of my wife - and there are many of them! - is that she is willing to do some things the old-fashioned way.  She comes of good pioneer stock, you know.  Not afraid to do a bit of hard work to accomplish her goals, even when it might be easier to take shortcuts.

Home canning is one of those things that's good to know how to do, and one of those life skills that are important to pass down from generation to generation. It isn't really necessary for us suburban folks who can quickly drive over to the store when the pantry gets low or we just get a hankerin' for some fruit on the table at dinnertime; but like all the rest of those skills that could one day mean the difference between living and dying, it's always good to know the basics.

Cheryl has always wanted to have or own fruit trees on the property so she could run the process from beginning to end; but the soil around here -- and the infestation of Asian beetles and every other kind of bizarre bug that tries to eat the bark and leaves off the trees -- precludes that. So we do the next best thing. We have friends at church who have trees in their yards (or orchards) and they let us know when we can come over and pick 'em.

So last week when a friend from church let us know that the pears from her trees were ready for picking, Cheryl and the kids went out and picked four boxes full of the yummy fruit.  And then spent several days peeling and cutting them and plopping them into jars and popping lids on them and heating them on the stove and watching them seal up and then cooling them down so they could be taken down to the basement where they will be stored for the next couple of years until they are called upon to come back and grace our table.

Besides canning pears, she also made pear butter, which is a particular favorite of mine for my morning peanut-butter toast.

We were in a bit of a race doing all the peeling and cutting and plopping, though.  The pears were nearly ripe when they were picked (some were ripe, actually) and the relative heat of the household air only accelerated the ripening process, so we had to move quickly.  Some of them, unfortunately, ripened a bit too quickly and were unusable.  But most of them did.

Most of the pears didn't look like the picture-perfect fruit one might find in the produce section of the grocery store. They were smaller than what is typically found in the commercial varieties, and weirdly shaped. Some had odd little dimples scattered all over them. Some even looked like faces!

Being a geeky engineer, I had to look on the Internet to try and figure out what caused those weird dimples.  Some sources said it was due to insects biting into the fruit and sucking out the juice, leaving these little hard areas that didn't re-fill; others said it was some kind of fruit virus.  Either way, they were like little pits and had to be cut out.  Some had so many dimples that there was hardly any fruit left by the time all the pits were removed!

There were worms in some of them, too. I hadn't realized before how the worms get into 'em, but apparently the blossom at the end of the pear is kind of like a natural tunnel into the interior; so sometimes we'd cut into a pear and find the middle all eaten away and a happy little worm sitting in there with a big, fat grin on his face, like he'd just won the lottery. Poor worm! He did win the lottery, but not quite the one he was thinking of.  More like the Shirley Jackson lottery. I don't mind a little extra protein now and then, but ... ick!

It took us more days than we had imagined to get all the pears done.  Four good-sized boxes full of pears, each requiring extra care and handling to cut around the pits and dimples and worms and weird shapes resulted in long hours at the table, our fingers stained brown by whatever chemical it is that turns the insides of the fruit brown when exposed to the air too long.  (We used Vitamin C in the soaking juice to keep the canned pears nice and pear-colored, but our hands had no such protection.)

Now the pears are resting quietly in the basement (except for the ones we decided to keep handy for immediate use!) and our fingers are recovering nicely from the staining and cramping ('cause it ain't easy to grip a paring knife for a long time) and the floor is recovering from being coated with a thin layer of pear-juice (which tends to make it sticky) and the compost is beginning the slow process of reducing all the peelings and pits into fertile soil again.

So ... pears are done.  Whaddya wanna can next?