Tonight I am making dill pickles with my Aunt Dorothy's recipe. I have 25 pounds of pickling cukes from the farmers market. Half will go to dill pickles, half to bread and butter. We already ate up the first batch of bread and butter I made a couple of weeks ago.

My mother used a big white cotton cloth to drain her jelly juice and yes....she would tie it with a string to the knob on the kitchen cupboard just like your mom did! In June when she would make strawberry jam on a hot day she would also make homemade white bread and we would eat the skimmed off the top strawberry jam with the hot bread and butter. Oh my. That was heavenly.

My grandmother used to can raspberries. Every Christmas morning in my memory I have had a small pink depression glass sauce dish with canned raspberries to start breakfast. Sweet.

I can some things every year. And I freeze ziplock bags of applesauce, and green tomatoes, and berries. But canning is way more evocative of those memories than freezing is.

There's another pile he picked from the garden this afternoon waiting on the kitchen counter. We had a decent crop of pickle cucumbers so the daughter made refrigerator pickles from most of them. We also enjoyed a few cuke and tomato salads.

My mother had a huge garden but we're working with an 8' X 8' raised bed. Mother made pickles and relishes and canned most of the tomatoes. It was a lot of work but worth it during the winter.

stories my father has told me about his family when he was a kid during The Depression. Each fall they would kill a pig and process it. As the youngest, my father's job was to keep the galvanized tub under the pig to catch all the blood used to make blood sausage.

My grandmother would pressure can a lot of pork in Mason jars. They also rendered all the pork fat into lard. My grandmother would fry up pork chops from the loins and these would be place into a 10 gallon crock and then the liquid lard would be poured over it. The crock went down into the root cellar (about three steps lower than the basement) and it was covered with a round board. When grandma wanted some pork to fry up for supper, she would send my dad down there with a plate and he had to stick his arm into the lard and fish out enough pork for that day's meal. It was sort of like pork confit.