Sometimes things just don’t work out as planned and it’s how you respond or recover from disappointment or change. We won’t even get into how the weather has been messing with our schedule and ability to function. We were surprised this week by one endeavor we thought we had down — canning applesauce. It’s a no-brainer at this point…or so we thought. The child comes in to see us one morning and swears she heard a mouse in the laundry room (not an impossibility but not our favorite as it is also the pantry, and the animal food room) so we looked about and couldn’t find evidence and moved on with our lives.
Then I was home one day and heard a weird sound on one of the shelves — also thinking it was a mouse (and yes, I act like a cartoon Mom — squealing and likely up on a chair) but I moved some boxes around and instead found a jar of recently canned applesauce slowly exploding from its lid! And then I look up at the top shelf where the flat of pint jars full of applesauce lives and I can see that more of them have burst (and glued themselves to the wall, the shelf, the box, etc). So, I pull it down and J proceeds to clean them out and take the lids off before the jars break — they are still alive! They start bubbling and pouring out of their jars, one shoots me with a glob of applesauce from across the room, and now we have an entire roasting pan of fermented applesauce. We still have no idea how it happened (though we suspect the paltry ‘pandemic’ lids), it’s never happened before but the whole batch is gone.
This isn’t the first time we’ve had fermented explosions — a summer or two ago we made Blackberry soda (per Pascal Baudar) and it hit the vaulted ceiling (and all over J, which at the time I thought was hilarious, he — not so much) and I’ve had Kimchi foam over, and obviously Doris the Sourdough Starter has escaped her pot a few times. But this was something else — applesauce everywhere. It won’t deter us from setting up another batch but we’ll be on the look out for signs of failure this time (and make sure we have prime grade lids!).
Time to sit in my favorite corner with a nice glass of wine and recoup.
Rock Bottom Homestead 