I just wanted to let you all know real quick that the new edition of Canning for a New Generation will be released on July 5 (!) and is currently available to preorder (B&N; Powell’s). Here’s the new cover, featuring another gorgeous photograph by Rinne Allen and a surprisingly thick spine (it’s a brick of a book):

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There are about fifty new recipes and lots of new photographs, and the general canning instructions and some of the older recipes have been updated and clarified a bit. If you have gift-giving in your future, this would be the edition to order!

I hope late spring–early meteorological summer is treating you all well. For my part I’ve been mostly holed up working on the slow cooker book, which is due all too soon—there’s so much I want to cram into it! On the one hand it’s a great project for this time of year, because even when you have three or four slow cookers bubbling away in the kitchen at once it doesn’t heat up the house at all. On the other hand I wish I’d saved more of the lighter, vegetarian dishes for summer testing, because when it’s ninety degrees in the shade and the cicadas are deafening (we’re at peak Brood V emergence right now in northern West Virginia, or at least I hope it’s peak) and all you want for supper is a bowl of cereal and a tall glass of iced tea, big pots of hot chilis and gumbos and tagines and bourguignons, no matter how delicious, can become a bit of a burden. Next time I start work on a book I’ll think more carefully about my schedule and what daily life will be like in the midst of it. In the meantime I’m filling up the extra freezer with both family-size and single-serving portions. I just hope I can find them when I go digging for them in a few months among the bags of frozen U-pick summer fruits.

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