"Maker movement" vs. charcuterie

I've been told there's this mass movement of people around my age to become "makers," implying that I am merely a byproduct of my time, age, and culture with my desire to know how to do everything myself.  However, there are boundaries that need to be stated.

(1) The "maker movement" mainly applies to those people making electronics do their bidding, i.e. the Arduino army, of which I am for sure a part of, but I won't post anything here unless I come up with something truly  novel.  People are coming up with new and awesome ways of using these easily reprogrammed units daily, a simple youtube search can debrief you nicely.

(2) Charcuterie, if I'm willing to trust Wikipedia, is merely a term to indicate the intentional alteration of animal protein for it's preservation.  However, apparently it's getting a hipster make-over in that.  Let me make my stance clear:  I'm all for home preservation of everything.  Can, pickle, dry, etc...  I want to know "how" to do everything, and strongly suggest everyone else also learn a thing or two in the process.  Moldy salamis aren't really my thing, though, and nor is bachilism.  Until I'm actually in a do-or-die, life-or-death situation, I probably won't be canning cooked beans (they last so long dried) nor curing my own salamis (have you heard of jerky?  it's quite nice, and not so risky.).  

Anyways, there's a lot of mis-information out there, especially regarding home canning / preservation.  I saw a Cooking Channel special on home canning just today that suggested you should pack cold jars with cold tomatoes and somehow they'll all be okay (the cans winded up half-full and mis-colored.  If it looks bad and unhealthy, it probably is).  Let's lay a few ground rules: never can something you wouldn't eat fresh, always boil anything you can for at least 5 min or more, follow well-established canning recipes when you do can, and never, ever, EVER, feed anything to an infant that has been home-canned.  Are we clear?  Good.

The risks of home-canning run pretty high for low-acid foods, and a vast majority of what we eat are low-acid foods.  If it's high-acid, it's sour, so you already limit your consumption of those foods, naturally.  You can, in reality, home-can low-acid foods, for the most part, using a pressure-canner and a little common sense.  Unfortunately, I have only a minimal of respect for the average person's common sense these days, seeing what passes for common sense among those of use with post graduate degrees working with Caltech and NASA.  Here's the baseline:  If you screw it up, you and everyone who eats your food will die.  

There's a really good chance you won't screw it up, though.  I can't drum up the statistics right now, but it's pretty unlikely that you'll kill a dinner guest with food poisoning from home-cured veggies compared with killing them with a parallel invitation from someone from oh, say a Borg offensive?

So let's share a few non-Borg recipes quickly, before they break through the kitchen door and proceed to kill off all of humanity:

Tomatoes (crushed or sauce)
Lots of tomatoes
Lots of off-the-shelf lemon juice

Prepare your tomatoes as you like - peeled, crushed, pureed, whatevs.  Sanitize a lot of jars in a simmering water bath, along with canning rims.  Put a tsp of lemon juice into each jar for each pint canned.  Leave about 1/4" (6 mm) headspace.  Put the tops on, screw down rims to "fingertip tight", and boiling water process for 15 min.  Honestly, if you have to ask questions about what all this means, you should probably look up more information and educate yourself better before you try to home-can anything.

Pickles (sour dill)
Lots of cucumbers
Lots of vinegar
Lots of spices
Fresh dill

Start at the top (most people won't start with canned tomatoes, so I'll actually go into more detail here).  Here's what you do.  Find your biggest, baddest pot around.  Find some Ball or Kerr jars that you can find lids (they have a little rubber seal) and rims (they screw down onto the glass jar) fittings for.  See if those jars plus lids and rims will fit in the pot and let 1" of water cover them.  If your pot is too shallow (let's face it, most of us don't actually own large stock pots or water-bath canners), then you should either give up on shelf-canning (refrigerator canning is also awesome, no worries), or you should buy shorter jars or a bigger pot.  I'm not going to waste a lot of time here, but freecycle is pretty awesome, and seriously, if you don't have a pot large enough that you can't boil two whole chickens in it at once, then you should start looking.  I know it seems too big, and I know you have no space for it, but believe me, a good, large soup stock pan is worth it.  How else will you survive the zombie apocalypse?  No, seriously, those who went before us always had one really large pot and it's so useful to own one that you should probably invest now, before everyone else figures it out and the best deal you'll get is a $60 pot from Martha Stewart.

The basic idea is this:  wash and cut the vegetables and pack them into the jars, then pour over hot liquid, cap them, and boil until all the bugs are dead.

The details are: wash and cut the vegetables, and pack them into jars.  Boil the liquid, then pour it over the vegetables. Cap the jars, boil them, and be happy all the bugs are dead.

More details, oh yes.  Dilute the vinegar 1:1 before boiling, or plan to eat your pickles within a few weeks.  Recommended spices include whole coriander, whole mustard seed, and whole cumin.  About a tsp spice per quart is good, but more never hurt.  The worst you can do is wind up with a spicy pickle, and no one ever complains about that.

Anyway, pack the pickles, pour over the liquid and spices, then cap them with lids and rims, then "process" (boil) for 5-15 minutes, depending on your risk tolerance, then store in a cool dark place and enjoy!!