My favorite way to preserve summer's bounty is by canning. I love all kinds of pickles and relishes, so making my own is a real treat. I can flavor my creations exactly the way I like them.

A lot of people are afraid of canning, thinking it rqeuires a lot of fancy equipment or special techniques. Having a canning set certainly makes canning easier, but it's not necessary for basic hot water canning. For that, all you need are jars with new lids, a deep pot with a lid, and several dish towels. Once you fill and seal the jars, you process them in boiling water for the time in the recipe (you use one of the dishtowels on the bottow to keep the jars from rattling). A silicon glove will let you pull the jars out of the water if you don't have a jar lifter.

Most pickles require very simple techniques. You slice or chop the vegetables and add them to sterilized jars along with spices, garlic, and other flavorings. You top the vegetables to be pickled or canned with a hot brine or syrup and put the lids on the jars. The sealed jars go into the pot. Once the water boils, you start counting the processing time. Once the time is up, you pull the jars from the water and set them on a dish cloth covered table to cool. As the jars cook, they will ping, letting you know that the seal has taken.

Once the jars have cooled completely, you can store them for up to a year. Most pickles take at least a few weeks to cure and achieve peak flavor, so avoid the temptation to eat them right away.

Canning isn't particularly hard, but it is time-consuming. Bringing the canning pot to a boil time and again, sterilizing the jars, and processing the jars takes far longer than you expect and it will make your house and kitchen unbelievably hot.

But opening a jar of ginger-bourbon peaches in the middle of winter makes it all worthwhile.

I plan to spend today doing as much of my canning as possible. Hopefully, next week, I'll have some photos of my day's achievements.