The woman with the canner is after you, vegetables.

Ah, canning season. I love it. I work eight hours at my desk job, come home and get the babies fed and tucked into bed (or, rather, baby - my husband is kind enough to deal with the big girl most nights), and spend four hours in the kitchen, and this is what I call fun.

The Ball Blue Book of Preserving is my go-to recipe book for canned goods. It's a whole $8, but worth a whole lot more.

My first dilly beans, four pints worth. I found some lovely, thin, straight green beans at the farmer's market and jumped on those suckers.

9 quarts and 3 pints of dill pickles. I love the Ball recipe for dill pickles, with its bit of sugar. I added a clove of garlic to each jar in addition to big heads of dill. The cukes I found at the market were also nice and thin. I finally managed to pack pickles well, so there's more pickle than brine in each jar.

Six pints of bread and butter pickles. This time I did not use the incredible amount of onions the recipe calls for (3 small ones instead of 8 small ones) and cut the slices thinner than I did the last time I made pickles, which was two years ago. For some reason (impatience?) I had cut them a half-inch thick, which is quite awkward. Plus, the husband complained, and I am nothing if not accomodating, at least when it comes to the width of pickle slices.