Spring Canning

I've been thinking about canning more than I've actually been able to can.  Spring is always a little hectic around here.  I have half of the violet infusion I need to make a batch of violet jelly; I just didn't have a lot of flowers this year and I think perhaps I won't get many more, so I might have to give that up for a year.  Last week I bought a pound of fiddleheads and was hoping to get them pickled but am only getting to them today - a whole week later!  To be fair, if we hadn't gone camping last weekend, I'd have done them sooner....

When I asked my husband if he wanted the sweet or sour fiddlehead pickles, he voted for sweet, so this year it will be just sweet ones.  I packed the fiddleheads into 5 half-pint jars and poured the cider vinegar syrup over them.  They're in the canner now for 10 minutes.

I haven't had a whole lot of foraging luck due to the rain, but I did discover wild carrots in the back yard and tasted a Solomon's Seal rhizome (yum!).  Yesterday at the stables I found curly dock, a huge amount of chickweed, and some kind of cress/mustard green thing.  Tasted a bit like arugula.  Looked a bit like it, too.  Anyway, I brought all that home and I'll be using the curly dock tonight in a risotto, but last night we had a salad with the chickweed, cress, a little of the curly dock (the small leaves), and garlic mustard flowers.  I liked it, but my husband said it tasted like freshly cut grass smells and, being a bitter taster, was abruptly put off by the cress.  As was the 10 year old.  I guess being a bitter taster makes foraging just that much harder.

Currently I'm supposed to be at a Tai Chi class in the park, but it's raining so I bailed.  Not that I mind the rain.  It's been such a dry winter and spring so far!