Blanching and Blessings

This past week I finally finished up the Fruit Preservation Project 2015. I didn't actually preserve all that much fruit, but it felt like it. This year I picked all of our fruit off a kindly neighbor's in-laws trees, then turned a bushel of pears and a box of summer apples into 11 quarts of pears, 7 quarts of applesauce, two large batches of fruit leather, and over 30 fruit squeezies (the only way my daughter will eat fruit). To serious canners, this doesn't seem like much. Granted, this was a "light" year for us also, but for someone who is only in her third canning season, it still seemed a monumental task.

One of my favorite things about canning season is the time that I get to spend with my mother-in-law. For whatever reason, we didn't can anything while I was growing up. We did lots of other things, and my mother equipped me with many superb life skills, but making applesauce wasn't one of them. Probably because I'm not a big fan of applesauce.

My husband, however, loves applesauce. He especially loves to dip Cheetos in applesauce.
Don't knock it 'til you've tried it.

Before Stephanie taught me how to preserve fruit, I had no idea what "blanching" was. For us, it is the first step in the process (after picking the fruit and letting it ripen).

Here's the Wikipedia term for the culinaryily illiterate, like me:

"Blanching is a cooking process wherein the food substance, usually a vegetable or fruit, is plunged into boiling water, removed after a brief, timed interval, and finally plunged into iced water or placed under cold running water (shocking or refreshing) to halt the cooking process."

Because I picked our fruit myself from trees that hadn't been treated (or touched, really), some of it looked pretty rough. I used the worst-looking ones for fruit leather and squeezie puree. I wasn't sure we would get any "whole" halves out of the bunch. I was amazed, however, that after an appropriate amount of blanching time, the skins came of easily and for the most part, the fruit underneath was white and pure. Sure, there were a few pears that took a little more rubbing to get the bruises off, and some where the core was just plain rotten, but for the most part, blanching took care of the impurities.

As I was blanching pear after pear this year, I thought about how our Heavenly Father uses the same process on us. Sometimes we look a little bruised, battered and scratched on the outside. It's hard to believe there could be anything worthwhile under our skin. That's when Heavenly Father plunges us into boiling water--He gives us trials, tests, and challenges. Sometimes it just feels like all we are doing is swimming in hot water, but after a time we are pulled out--and then comes another "shock." The cold water brings another trial, and if it works, we become humble enough to be easily changed. That outer skin and the natural man slips away with a little twisting and rubbing.

It isn't pleasant for us, but once the process is said and done, we are in a better state than we were before and the blanching becomes a blessing, and the sweet fruit of those trials can be preserved for years to come.