<A random selection of recent canning-related news and recipes>

* Spicy homemade ale

This isn’t a canning recipe, but: how refreshing does this  homemade ginger ale by the blog 30 Bucks a Week look? It appears to be both tasty and highly appropriate for flu season. I love the shot of the drink paired with some saltines – a classic childhood flu remedy combo that North-American moms have been administering for years, alongside that other health-promoting elixir: the mighty chicken soup.

* Surprise! Like the cat, canning came back

I’m as surprised as anyone. I didn’t grow up canning with my mom and neither of my grandmothers canned, to my knowledge, or perhaps they’d given it up by the time I was a kid. I’m picking up a thread from my great-grandmother and I’m as surprised as anyone to have become so unhealthily (or is it healthily?) obsessed with it.

Parade recently ran an item on what they consider to be “Five Unexpected Food Trends,” and number five on the list was canning, with a reference to Canning Across America. The other four: wedding cupcakes (this doesn’t seem so out-of-left-field to me,  just an extension of the cupcake trend that peaked in about 2004), cooking classes, both amateur and pro  (also not surprising given the insane popularity of cooking shows like Top Chef, Hell’s Kitchen etc.), food trucks in Portland, Oregon (again, not a shocking twist in food history, food trucks fit in just fine in Portland’s scruffy, DIY food scene) and upscale stadium food (a lot was written about this last year, but maybe sushi is still unexpected at a football game?).

* Home economics class

The unfathomably vast world wide inter-web continues to amaze me. Here’s something I fished out of the cyber abyss just the other day: the simply named Preserve site out of Portland. I’m digging the vintage design. Started by two friends, a writer named Harriet Fasenfest (she has also blogged at Culinate) and a home economist and teacher named Marge Braker, the site offers recipes and seasonal tips and advertises preserving and “householding” classes (though these haven’t been updated for a while).