Plumbing tool helps with canning

Weekends still equal canning time in our home as fall fruits are ripening. Yesterday we worked on the bucket of pears a friend of ours gave to us. As I read instructions for canning pears, Jim went out to his shop to create a “corer.” I didn’t understand what he was doing or why until I saw the magic happen.

As we all know, one of the time consuming tasks of preserving fruit is peeling and cutting. Jim’s idea was to make it easier by turning a ¾” piece of copper pipe into a corer. All he did was cut it to the correct length to core a pear then attach a joint piece of pipe to the top to use as a handle.

To core the pear, he sat it upright on a cutting board, placed it over the core then pushed down. When he showed me the perfectly round hole it made, leaving us with less cutting to do when we quartered the pears, it looked like a big of magic.

So now the pears are on the shelf and we’re looking forward to delicious fruit this winter. It pays to have a husband who’s in the home repair business. Who knows what tool he’ll put to work in the kitchen for our next time consuming task.