RE: The unset jelly (nice syrup though?) Well I happened to speak to my Mother in law and she explained to me that sure-jell and regular fruit pectin should not be used interchangeably- which is why the sure-jell recipe only needed 4 1/2 cups sugar per 3 cups juice and the pectin recipe called for 7 cups sugar/3 cups juice. Needless to say I did not have sure-jell but will definately have it next time. The recipe I used did contain 1/2 cup lemon juice though. The only possible problems I can think of is 1. I thought I had 6-8qt pot (the biggest dutch oven type that comes in kitchen sets?) and the recipe said add pectin and boil hard one minute, stirring constantly. The only problem? Every time it boiled hard it boiled ALL OVER (still getting it out of my burners!) So I was letting it get boiling good at just at the point of going over, picking it up off stove for a second or two. 2.I was also unsure how to keep jars hot enough as I don't own dishwasher so I put them in oven in a pan with a couple inches of water in the bottom of it- set it to 200° but when I took the jars out there was condensation in them so they weren't "dry"- does this factor in at all or is that ok? I couldn't think of any way to dry them fast enough to pour jelly in without getting burned or having it cool too fast.

Malna - you ask how the recipe sounds so here is a Brit perspective. I am always interested to hear of elderberries being used by you US cooks because over here they are only used for jelly or wine as the seeds are considered too unpalatable to eat. To me that recipe sounds very seedy and crunchy. And although I love almond flavour I don't really like the sound of mixing it with elderberries which have a very distinctive flavour of their own. I think there is quite a fundamental culinary difference in taste between the UK and the States. Many of the recipes you exchange on this forum sound a bit excessively flavoured to my ear. For example, I mean no offence by this but raspberry and chocolate preserve which I have read of here sounds absolutely disgusting to me. I love both and feel that mixing them would detract from both. However, through you I have discovered that strawberry and rhubarb is delicious. And that's a combination I never would have dreamt of trying before. But then I believe that blackcurrant is widely disliked in the US. I find these differences really interesting and I hope none of you will take offence at my comments. I think we just have plainer tastes over here.

I don't think it's correct to say that worms "love" used coffee grounds, at least not in the way they react to melon rinds or corn meal, by visibly flocking to them while wiggling happily. I think coffee grounds just have a much longer lead time before they become worm-edible, possibly because it takes a fungal process to break down the cellulose component of the beans. I used to put my used coffee grounds in the bin still in their paper cone filter, but I found this creates a long-lasting clump of grounds that tends to dry out and become impervious to rewetting, and takes an extraordinarily long time to start breaking down on its own. The other drawback to solid masses of grounds is that they will heat up, which you can really notice if you dig around in the bin with your bare hands. Now I dump the grounds out of the filter and mix them together with the other food scraps.

I do use the salsa screen for Annie's Salsa and love it. The salsa screen gives you a semi-chunky puree. I hate to use the word puree, because it isn't really a puree. The sauce screen gives you a puree that is the exact same texture as canned tomato sauce, so I use it for tomato sauce, pasta sauce, ketchup, bar-b-q sauce, etc. The salsa screen gives you something thicker than puree with bigger chunks, but I hate to call it chunky because it really isn't chunky either. It is just bigger pieces of tomato in something that is too semi-chunky to be considered a puree. It is a finer cut than handcut, but I've used it for so long---since around 2008, that I have forgotten what salsa looks like if made from all hand-cut tomatoes. If I am making one batch of Annie's salsa, I usually cut the onions, sweet peppers and jalapeno peppers by hand. If I am making multiple batches in one day, I switch to the food processor and cut huge mounds of onions and sweet peppers, and a smaller mound of jalapenos (or serranos if I am subbing in some serranos for part of the jalapenos to get a hotter salsa) first before I do anything else. Then, I measure out the onions, sweet peppers and jalapenos into gallon zip lock bags, essentially creating a pre-mix of those three veggies that I'll add to tomatoes and the other ingredients one batch at a time. It is a huge time saver, and allows me to get all that chopping out of the way, put the food processer washable parts in the dishwasher, and put away the food processor to keep the counters clear. I have a little herb mill I use to cut up the cilantro in big batches that I can measure out and dump into the previously mentioned pre-mix of veggies, and I do all the garlic at once using a garlic press. If I work really hard in the morning and nothing interferes, I can quickly cut up all the veggies and herbs for up to 4 or 5 batches of salsa in the morning, and then cook/can the salsa in the afternoon. Or, I can do all the chopping and cutting in the evening, and get up and can first thing in the morning. When I do this, I call it speed canning and the one rule my family knows about speed canning is that everyone needs to stay out of my way when I'm speed canning because if they come into the kitchen during that time, I am likely to put them right to work. In the early years here, I cut up and chopped and minced each batch individually as I went along, so when one batch went into the canner, I started processing all the veggies and herbs for the next batch. That seems much slower to me than the speed canning method I use now. I like that I can run all the tomatoes through the mill and be done with it for the day. I like that I can then do the same with everything cut up by the food processor, herb mill and garlic press. I do run through a lot of zip lock bags when doing prep for speed processing, but I can turn them inside out and wash them and reuse them. My favorite thing is merely that once all the chopping and such is done, then all those machines and tools are out of the way and I have all the kitchen counter space available just for the canning part of the process. You have to find what works for you. The method I described is what works for me. Because I grow so many tomatoes and because our plants' spring productive period generally is cut short when the June heat sets in and stops fruitset, I find myself processing huge amounts of tomatoes in the main salsa canning period which normally starts around mid-June and can run through sometime in July. It is almost too much to do in that time frame, but the tomatoes are ripe when they're ripe, so I just deal with it. Once I've made all the salsa I want to make, I switch to making sauce, catsup, bar-b-que sauce, chili base, a veggie juice similar to V-8 juice, etc. During the same time frame I'm making salsa, I often am dehydrating excess bite-sized tomatoes to save for winter snacks and salads, and am freezing excess tomatoes (sometimes whole, sometimes run through the salsa screen for tomatoes to use in cooking in the winter). It always is a relief to finish the main crop of tomatoes. When that day arrives, I pull out about 90% of the tomato plants, leaving a few to provide us with tomatoes for fresh eating for the rest of the summer. It would kill me if I had to keep up that pace of canning all summer long. The biggest trick is just getting the tomatoes, onions, sweet peppers and hot peppers all to be ready for canning at the same time. Sometimes the sweet peppers are lagging behind all the others. When that happens, I just buy sweet bell peppers in bulk so I don't have to postpone salsa making endlessly. While our canning talk has been focused on tomatoes, let's not forget that everything else is maturing at the same time, so I'm usually squeezing in husking and processing corn at the same time, along with picking fruit and processing it, and harvesting snap beans and dealing with them. At least potatoes and onions will sit in a cool room and wait until I can find time to process them. My summer squash was planted (probably in too much shade) at the west end of the garden this year and has been slow to grow, so I'm just now getting enough squash to process. June and July is harvest/processing insanity time and I'm always relieved when it is over. I do not regret that I have a large food processing garden, but there are days I wonder if I've lost my mind. I have wondered what summer would be like if there was no harvest at all to process, and I cannot even picture it. Well, in 2011 there wasn't much of a harvest to process due to the exceptional drought and extreme heat, but we were at fires day and night virtually every day, so I didn't even have time to think about the food that I wasn't processing. That's one reason I try to process 2 years of food every single year. That gives us a big reserve of preserved food to get us through year 2 if any crop in the garden fails in year 2. It just kills me to have to buy produce at the grocery store if it is something we can grow here and preserve. I'd much rather have our own produce, picked and then processed right here at the peak of perfection, or (of course) eaten fresh within a day or two of being harvested. I make my meal plans for the day after doing the morning harvesting, and wouldn't want to live any other way. Sometimes I think that Tim forgets how much money the garden saves us on buying fresh, organic produce, so I drag him to Central Market down in Southlake, TX, after we leave CostCo and I make sure he notices the eye-popping prices of fresh, organic produce. He goes home with a brand new appreciation for all that the garden produces for us, and he also doesn't mind buying organic lettuce or whatever in the summer because he understands what we can and cannot grow here in the heat. He appreciates organic produce more than he used to because he has learned how hard it can be to grow organically. I cannot imagine our lives without the garden, but every now and then I'd like to have a day where nothing is waiting to be harvested or to be washed, sorted, blanched, cooked, canned, frozen, fermented or dehydrated. I do stay very busy in the main harvesting/canning season, but I have days I just want to be lazy and do nothing. However, what I have found is that when the lazy urge strikes, after a couple of ours of laziness, my conscience gets the better of me and I get up and to into the kitchen and deal with the waiting produce. Our first southern peas now are 3 or 4 days from harvesting and I am excited, even though that means I am about to start in on the endless routine of shelling peas. I love it even though it is time-consuming. To me, nothing says summer like sitting with a big bowl of purple hull peas and shelling them. Then, if I have enough purple hulls, I make purple hull pea jelly. And, of course, we get to eat purple hull peas for weeks and weeks and weeks in the summer, and I put up and freeze the rest. I also planted a long row of lima beans this spring, and they are flowering now, though I don't know if they've set any beans yet. I just kind of run right past them every day to get to the tomatoes. I don't even have to look at the calendar in summer, and neither does anyone else in my family. We can tell, at the very least, what month it is by what produce is piling up in the kitchen. I kinda love that, though there's days I also hate it. I was normal when we moved here in 1999 and was perfectly happy if the garden produced just enough for us to eat fresh and give away the excess. Over the years, though, as the soil improved and our yields improved, I realized that I could preserve huge amounts of food if I tried. So, I do. I grew up with a father who gardened and canned, and with many relatives who did the same, so putting food by was nothing new to me. It is just that when we lived in town on a relatively shady lot, I couldn't grow enough of anything to have much excess left over after fresh eating. Now, we have endless sun and endless space and I grow too much of everything. My attitude is that too much is good. Dawn