Pop, Pop, Pop...the sweet sound of success.

Last evening, my wife trapped herself in the kitchen for about 3 hours for some serious canning.  Actually, things went pretty fast, because she(and I) took care a lot of the work up front.  The apricots and peaches were peeled, cooked and pureed in advance, so for the jams she just combined what she wanted with some frozen strawberries, and reheated/blended away.  The butters are a little tougher, because you actually need to boil them, and then simmer for a while, and then do a 'mound' test with it on a plate.

I helped by keeping the kids occupied, and jumping into the kitchen in between batches to wash a bunch of stuff by hand, so we could reuse the same pot/spoons for each batch of jam.  I offered to help more, but my wife has a bit of a system, so sometimes helping is staying out of the way. 

It was all worth it though:

Let's see...we have 9 half-pints of Spiced Peach/Strawberry Jam, 10 half's of Peach/Apricot/Strawberry Jam, and then 6 pints of Peach/Apricot Butter.

Not only does all this stuff taste really good, but since my wife has started canning last summer, I don't think we've bought a single jar of 'store jelly'.