Adventure #2 {Pressure Cooking}

To some of you, pressure cooking is no big deal. You're wondering how it could be considered an "adventure." But others of you are wondering why in the world anyone would intentionally put a bomb in their kitchen.

Well, to the first group of you, I will ask "Have you ever pressure cooked outdoors in the dark?"

And to the latter group, I will say "I didn't put the bomb in my kitchen. I put it out on my deck."

You see, last week's we're-going-through-a-new-life-phase-and-subsequently-I-have-a-lot-of-pent-up-motivation adventure was...........

wait for it.............

drum roll please......


Pressure cooking....outside.....on the grill......in the dark......in the rain.

Never a dull moment around here, I tell ya.

I feel the need to clarify my outdoor food preservation experience because I'm pretty sure the above would be considered "unsafe."

I have one of those glass stove tops, and rumor has it that they tend to crack under a pressure cooker. Nobody has ever told me why. I don't know if it is the prolonged heat, the weight, a combination of the two, or something else all together. But because we all know that rumors are completely reliable, I decided to attempt pressure cooking for the second time ever (first time alone) outside on the gas burner on our grill.

By the time I got the kids to bed, the dog fed, the jars located and washed, and the veggies prepped it was well past sun down. But regardless of the lack of lighting, I set out with a one year old pressure cooking lesson under my belt and two sets of only slightly conflicting instructions in front of me.

Every bug in the county found the outdoor light hanging just over the deck door, and I could see lightning flashing in the distance, but even so, I found the serenade of the crickets and wind through the trees entirely peaceful as I waited and waited and waited.........and waited......for the pressure gauge to reach 10 pounds.

I was only up 'til midnight that night. And only one jar didn't seal.

The next night? I gave it a whirl in the house on the glass cook top. All the bugs had found their way into the house the previous night, anyway, and it would have been just too lonely canning without them.

The rumor about the cracking glass stove top may be just that, a rumor, because it worked just fine, and I've got 12 pints of green beans and 12 pints of beets to prove it.

In other adventure news, I mowed the whole lawn with the spaceship zero-turn that week. I haven't shot any cylons yet, but I will once I quit trying to take out the trees in our yard.