Customer Reviews

Preserving for All Seasons

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Excelent book! Did you know you can do canning with just the items already in your home?! You can do as few as 3 cans, as well! Wonderful recipies, and even recipies for the finished products! Very Good!

I like the seasonal organization of the book, and have found many of the recipes to be delicious. My favorites include Pizza Oil, Rhubarb-Orange Compote and Pistou and Pesto. This is a great little book packed with good recipes.

The book is OK. It has little to no instruction on how to can or preserve. Just recipes, and mostly fruit. And the recipes are for things that are a bit unusual and exotic. Not really the kind of book I would keep as a staple in my canning library.

I started canning and preserving a couple of years ago when our apple tree started bearing fruit. I'm not a novice, but I had trouble with several of the recipes in this book. While the author states that most of the recipes can be made in an hour or so, the recipes have little or no specific instructions to help guide the cook, and absolutely no directions about the canning or preserving process. (I did find the "use by" guidelines helpful, though.) For example, it would be helpful in a recipe using oranges and orange peel to get an idea of what to do with the thin slices once they have been soaked - do you cut them in half? Leave them in whole slices? Cut into small pieces? Also, I don't find that directions like "cook until thick" are very helpful. Thick as in a cream sauce? Thick as apple butter? I attempted the carrot-cinnamon marmalade since it seemed easy and quick, and I finally gave up on it ever thickening after 90 minutes of boiling and stirring. I did find many of the recipes interesting but, as another reviewer has said, many seem to have more exotic ingredients than one would usually be growing in a home garden. I wouldn't recommend this one unless you just like preserving for its own sake.

Wonderful recipes for preserves as well as other dishes. However, there is a recipe for shark in this book, which may be objectionable to readers who believe, as I do, that sharks should be preserved (not made into preserves)!