May Giveaway Contest - One Lucky Reader Will Win Bernardin Guide to Home Preserving

The busy home canning season is just around the corner so I decided to offer a little incentive to get you thinking about home canning.  This month's giveaway contest is for a copy of the current Bernardin Guide to Home Preserving.  This beautiful 148 page softcover book is filled with more than 300 recipes for home canning, freezing, drying and mason jar crafts.  It is a valuable resource for home canning!  For those who do not know, Bernardin is the leading Canadian authority on home canning, the equivalent to Ball in the US.  The home canning recipes all meet current USDA guidelines to ensure you are putting delicious yet safe food on your table. 

The May Giveaway Contest for the Bernardin Guide to Home Preserving is open to all residents of Canada and the United States (mainland only).   To qualify for a chance to win, you must comment on this post giving one reason why you would like to win this wonderful addition to your home cooking library.  Please include your email address so I can contact you if you win.  The deadline for entry is May 31, 2013.  The lucky winner will be notified by email on June 1 and will have 48 hours to respond with shipping address.  If there is no response after 48 hours, another winner will be chosen who will be given the same opportunity as the first.  Good luck to all who enter!

On the home preserving note, I have been quite busy doing a bit of last minute canning of dried beans and stocks before the busiest time of home canning begins for me.  As many of you know, I home can year round with the canners only taking a break when we are at our vacation home.  I did manage to do a bit of boiling water bath processing at our vacation home but will never get up to the level I do at home because of lack of storage.  We rent our vacation home out January through April and while we do have an owner's closet for storage, it is not practical to store much in the way of food.  I have to say too that when we fly to our vacation home in Florida, we can't bring home canned foods because they are over the 3 oz flight restriction.  My gosh, do we ever miss our home canned foods, not to mention the sticker shock of having to buy what I normally can!   We spend about two and a half months there divided into three trips so it is a big adjustment not having the home canned foods we are used to relying on.  This year we are driving down for the second trip, flying home between the second and third trip, then driving home from the third trip which means I will be able to take a good supply of home canned foods down to enjoy while there.  There's nothing like a taste of home while on vacation :)