Jars

I have a whole other post drafted about hoarding collecting of things most people would throw away. I hope to develop in to show why this is not crazy, but useful.

For the moment I will show you the jars I've collected, with the help of Vivien, I might add. The reason I started saving small bottles was because of the fruit alcohols I make for Christmas presents. It turns out that few bottles look right other than small (187 ml or thereabouts) wine bottles or slightly larger ones with nice shapes. A salad dressing bottle seems only destined to hold salad dressing or a lemon juice bottle only lemon juice. Perhaps it's a lack of imagination on my part.

Keepers.

However, wine bottles are great for freezing rose hip syrup. And then Bill took up making homemade wine. I was pleased to see him find a new hobby. So far there have been few results I call really drinkable, but every now and then he comes up with something really nice, like elderberry and damson wine. We tend to keep bottles with a punt (a dip in the bottom) for dealing with sediments for his wine making. Flat bottomed bottles are for rose hip syrup.

When Buy-the-Kilo opened up at the metro station near us, she sold her products either in expensive (to my mind) new jars and bottles (£2/£3 each) or she took community donations of jars which she cleaned and sold on for 50p each. Mostly she encouraged people to bring their own containers. I am amazed I've not written here about her marvelous shop, but then I've not written much here of late at all. It deserves its own post, I think. Anyhow, I saved jars to take to her.

For Jackie / re-cycling

Then when I began wanting to make jams I needed the type of jar with a dimple on the top. (Jam making in Britain is a whole different process to most food preservation in the US. I won't pretend to have the expertise to explain why this works). I wanted smallish ones, so that I could spread the varieties out and interesting shapes were nice, too. Since we'd recycled most of our marmalade jars from the past and honey jars don't have dimples, I needed help with this. Vivien also went through a jam making stage but she kindly shared a few of her jam jars. When I got really desperate I went down to Buy-the-Kilo and bought jars from her for 50p each. She had some nice square ones on offer.

Having been on holiday to Vienna with Jane and Chris, Bill's sister and brother-in-law, we discovered not only that Chris liked stewed apples but we did as well. So I began saving coffee and other large jars for freezing stewed apples to eat with our porridge or cereal. These coffee jars were also useful for filling up with dried fruits or popcorn at Buy-the-Kilo.

More keepers.

We got all these jars out of the loft or under the stairs because I understood that Jackie, at Buy-the-Kilo, was running out of her community donated jars and bottles and I had placed an order with her. Our original plan was to take these jars down to her when Bill picked up our order. Then she changed her mind about this and was using her full price bottles. All her dry products she was putting in paper bags and charging 10p each, what they cost her. It may be that people are nervous about used jars or she doesn't now have time to be re-cleaning them all.

Of course, jars can be used to store food, much like the plastic containers we're all used to. The freezer has lots of glass jars in there with various contents. The same as with plastic containers, they need to be under-filled to give room for expansion when the contents freeze. With plastic containers the lid will pop off while glass may shatter. 

My button collection is stored in jars, sorted by colour group. That deserves a photo by itself when I get a moment. How can just staying at home feel so busy?

In the end, I picked out all the jars I thought I might want for jams, stewed apples and purchasing post-pandemic at Buy-the-Kilo and we recycled the rest. I didn't have to heart to ask Bill to haul them all back up into the loft. Hope I don't find I needed those after all!