Meet Viola!


This lovely lady is Viola with a long I if you please.  She is my most favorite kitchen appliance du jour, an All American pressure canner.  This girl can hold 19 regular mouth pints and 14 regular quarts at a time.  Unbelievable.  I just got her for Christmas and tried her out yesterday.  As she is no small thing it does take a wee bit of finagling on my dinky part but a two step ladder in front of the stove saves me from getting burnt.  For her first time out we canned the all important black beans.  We eat so many I can't believe I was limited to only seven jars at a time before now.  What a charmer.  Then I got lucky and ran into a ground beef sale.  That is when the true fun began.
I cooked up the ground beef getting rid of as much fat as possible and the loaded up my sweet Viola.  So far so good but if you know me something has to go awry at some point in what seems like a most productive day.  Well... the seventy five minutes passed of happy pressure canning so I went on cutting a pattern out while she decompressed.  It seemed like a great use of time.  After a while (who knows I can't tell how long when I get busy)  I went down to unlock Viola and see what she had down.  I unscrewed all of the latches and start to slightly twist the lid off of my shiny new canner. Nothing.  Ok I am wimp, I need to try harder.  Still nothing.  Tromp upstairs to complain and am told maybe it needs to cool a bit more.  Ok sounds logical.  Go back downstairs and since I am not all that patient I try again.  NOTHING!!!!!  Ok I start to panic.  What if I somehow managed to explode all of the jars in the cooker and not know it and it is now jammed and stuck forever?????? Dramatic I know but I am good at that!  By this point I am screaming in my head THINKTHINK THINK!!! Suddenly a light bulb.......Google.  I will google. Race to the computer and type "All american pressure canner lid stuck".  Holy buckets! I am not alone in my predicament.  There are more than enough pages on the problem.  Apparently as soon as pressure hits zero you have to open this baby pronto.  Had to pry it a bit with a screwdriver.  Whew! Thanks, google.  And my jars of burger were a thing of beauty.
But now I have another predicament what can I can tomorrow?????

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