The bottom fell out, literally!

Do as I say, not as I do. I was canning salsa and had my jars nicely sanitized and hot in my 225 degree oven. But then, I needed one more jar and took a shortcut. One cold jar + 7 hot jars of salsa = 1 broken jar. Check it out.

On a positive note, purchasing and using a small hand-crank food chopper was a real game changer (thanks, Nancy!) in making salsa--saved me a good hour of chopping peppers and onions. I also used it for making pear jam instead of the blender and it worked great!