Pickling salt is a finer grain compared to Kosher. If your following a recipe and its stating an exact measure of pickling salt, and you use Kosher, the amount will not be the same. Pickling salt also dissolves quicker. If you can tomatoes as a sauce or juice, there is a better way with a lot less labor and time. The use of a Roma food strainer will work very well. The tomatoes need absolutely no prepping, peeling or anything else, unless the are to big for the hopper, then you cut them. When I canned tomatoes from 200 plants, it would a have taken days to get them all peeled and mashed. Usually I like thick sauces, as I cut the tomatoes open, dig out most of the liquid and seeds, and run through Roma (Villaware), and the skins and seeds are passed out the end as waste. The sauce is quite thick and doesn't need as much cooking down to get it thick. Instead of lemon juice, I use citric acid. I just don't want a lemon taste in my tomatoes, no matter how small it might be. Also, I add the citric and salt to the empty jars just before they are being filled. In this way, your sure that the acid level is exact as well as salt. Cooking the tomatoes down with the salt and acid at the begining, can increase the acidity and saltiness. For apple sauce or other apple recipes, I like adding an acid blend of citic, malic and tarteric. This can help safety if the apples are overripe or low in acid. Additionally, ascorbic acid should be used with apples as it helps retain color.

No need to return the pots. Essentially what is happening is that there's no place, no imperfection, in the pot on which bubbles can form. With no bubbles forming, the water's surface tension keeps the heat in, and the water superheats. When you put something in the water, you break the surface tension, and you get explosive boiling. Are the pots stainless steel or non-stick? If stainless, simply give them a scrubbing along the insides with something that will rough up the surface, Comet cleanser usually works. Another way, if you don't want to mess up the look of the pots, is to put a wooden spoon in the pot as you're boiling our water. The spoon gives a great place for bubbles to form.

We love this range, the burners have plenty of power. 2qts of water will boil on the high-powered corner burner in about 5 minutes, even faster in a big pot on the center burner. The center burner has plenty of power for authentic stir-frying with a residential-sized wok. The oven is fantastic and the even heat has really upped our baking game. (Note that the unit I bought also had gas orifices for each burner that that were sized for propane; these orifices are much smaller than those for natural gas and I had to drill them out to achieve the approximately equivalent BTU rating for natural gas as stock natural gas orifices were not available for any source I could find. Drilling all 5 orifices required getting consulting a chart to determine the right size drill bits but only took 15 minutes.) A couple of issues we have found: there is some coupling between the air supply for the top burners and the oven, which has a very tight seal; we have found that closing the oven door abruptly when there are many burners in use can cause the smaller burners to go out. However, the auto-relighting system immediately kicks in and the spark generator will cause them to fire up again. Another issue is that the top burner grates have been designed with a pattern that is very stylish but fails to support smaller saucepans at more than the 4 closest points, so a small saucepan or frying pan has to be centered carefully or it may tip over without the outer 4 points of the grating to support it.

Maybe whisk or (can"t think of word for machine with whirling blades that grinds up food) to add some air to the water for the fish pond, as many fish draw air from the water in which they swim, don't they? It's all pushed out of water in the boiling, isn't it? I hope you're reasonably well able to cope with the issues before you these days, Lucille. We had some snow on Tuesday, I called landlord in early evening to say no rush to clear lane. About noon on Wed. his son came and ploughed the lane and yard, which they use fairly frequently for their sod farming: first time this season. ole joyful