Today’s Old School lesson is a hands-on project: how to install a pour spout on a canning jar–great for dry cooking ingredients like sugar.
This is the sort of DIY project Grandma could have really gotten into.
- It’s free
- It uses up things that would otherwise be thrown away
- It’s useful
- It’s easy and only takes a few minutes
For this project, all you need is an empty salt carton, a mason canning jar with a screw band, and a sharp knife.
Take an empty salt carton. The Damsel won’t judge if she finds out you dumped the salt into something else just so you could do this project.
CAREFULLY cut around the top of the carton by inserting a sharp knife straight down and moving around the top. Hold the carton firmly.
The cut doesn’t need to be perfect and smooth…just do the best you can without drawing blood. PLEASE. The Old School doesn’t have a school nurse.
Fill a canning jar with some dry, pourable substance like sugar. Fit the cut piece on its top and then screw on the band. The serendipity of this project is that cutting a salt carton around its edge EXACTLY fits a wide-mouth canning jar. Neat, huh?
If you want to use a regular-mouth canning jar, use its lid (not the screwband) to trace a cutting circle onto the top of the salt carton.
The Damsel is pretty excited about using this, since she keeps her sugar in a huge bin in the pantry. (Even though the seven sprogs don’t all live at home, she can’t seem to stop her mega-cooking ways.) This way, she can measure out a little sugar quickly and easily, without having to open the big bin. This would also be a great place to put baking soda, if you’re one of those who succumbed to the call of the Giant Costco Baking Soda Bag.
The Damsel would love to hear any other great uses her students come up with.
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