This is where it gets tricky to keep up with a canning log. During the days of Aug and Sept, when the tomatoes, peppers and peaches are coming on faster than I can shove them into jars.  I'm going to start keeping a brief list. I'll add explanations when I have time.

8-29-12

• 7 Quarts Crushed Tomatoes
• 2 pints of Choke Cherry Syrup

8-30-12

• 5 pints Mrs. Wages Chili Base
• 5 pints Mrs. Wages Salsa
• 7 Quarts Crushed Tomatoes
• 6  Quarts Tomato Juice

Chokecherries

This week has been filled with the picking, washing, processing and putting up of chokecherries.

My sweet neighbors allowed us to pick the chokecherries from their tree. They lent us their juicer and even gave us her mother's jelly and syrup recipes. I am so glad that they shared this heritage with us!

This is a steamer:

The fruit your juicing goes into the top and water goes into the bottom.  As you heat the water, the fruit is steamed and the fruit juices drip into the middle compartment. I juiced our chokecherries for about 8 hours. I could have juiced for another day, but I was ready to make my jelly and wanted to return the juicer.

The jelly recipe I follow called for:

• 3 cups juice
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 4 cups sugar
• 1 package of pectin

Her recipe didn't call for processing. She said just to made sure the lids seal and they'd be fine. That my friends is crazy town and never never never going to happen at my house!  I know her family and her mother's family have been surviving this for about 100 years. But that, like I said, is so not happening here.

So I processed the all my chokecherry batches in a water bath for 15 min.

I doubled the recipe for the 1st batch and ended up with 12 1/2 pints of delicious, but pretty thin jelly. It was more like syrup really.  So I did a little on line research and found that by adding 1/2 cherry juice and 1/2 apple juice the jelly would set better. So that is what I did for round 2.  That batch gave me 4 1/2 pints of VERY jelled jelly.

I had just enough juice at that point to put up a batch of Pioneer Chokecherry Syrup. (4 pints)  I found this recipe in a Wyoming pamphlet on putting up wild fruit.

• 4 cups chokecherry juice
• 4 cups sugar
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 1 tsp cream of tartar

Before this week, I had never even seen a chokecherry, let alone tasted it's jelly or syrup. This jelly is so incredibly delicious.  It is so so yummy in a very unique way. I hope to add chokecherries to our yearly canning list.

Cherry Sploosh

Everyone I live with knows if ever a windfall of fruit or veg enters this house it must be cut up an shoved into jars the very day it shows up.  I have an unshakeable belief that all produce should be canned the day it is picked.

All activities came to a screeching halt, on Friday afternoon when Perrin, the clever boy, showed up with 2 bags full of CHERRIES!  The genius worked out a "will work for cherries" arrangement with an older lady a mile down the road.

The first batch of jam (recipe found in The Ball Blue Book") was a complete and total mess, and will forever be know as Cherry Sploosh.  My water bath wasn't boiling when the jam reached temp, so I turned the stove to low, hoping the jam would stay warm. Well it went beyond warm, past the gelling point and must have reach hard crack. I have 5 1/2 pints of cherry hard candy!

The next attempt (we shall call the redeeming batch) was too yummy to be considered food storage, and was immediately devoured.

This, my friend, is what I am working on today. I'll use these beauties to make pie filling, following the Utah State University Extension Office instructions.

Update:     6-29     The pie filling turned out great. I ended up with 7 quarts and 3 pints.

Side note:     Spending the day pitting and chopping cherries will turn your fingers a disconceerting shade of brown. If you don't want brown fingers, wear gloves.    

Putting Up

Last year I tried valiantly (in the beginning) to create a canning journal. What I wanted was a written record of the recipes I used and any alterations I made, so that, 6 months later, when I was eating a yucky jar of salsa or a favorite jar a jelly, I would know what went into that jar. Basically, I wanted a way to sift thru all canning recipes I try, to find the ones we love.

The problem I ran into was exhaustion. Canning isn't hard, but it is long hours standing on a hard tile floor in an increasingly hot kitchen. By the end of a good canning day, I'm usually pretty tired.

I'm  going to attempt a canning log again . But this summer I'm shifting it from paper, to this blog....so here we go...

Putting Up

When this girl walks into her local market and sees strawberries at $4.99 a flat, the universe shifts and all plans for that day are justified away to make room for jam making.  This time I had the CRAZY idea that Thing 1 and Thing 2 (being the chief jam consumers in the house) should help with this batch.  Canning with a 13 and 11 year old was...interesting...

It was nice to a buddy to stir the jam while I cut up berries for the next batch.

That day we made Berry Preserves from the canning book "Putting Up"  by Steve Dowdney.  I'm not really in love with this book. The recipes are ok, but Dowdney's canning techniques are confusing.  Instead of following his water bath instructions I followed the directions in my Ball Blue Book and the jam turned out pretty great.

We also made Triple Berry Lemonade Concentrate from a recipe I adapted from Canning Homemade.  

Triple Berry Lemonade  Concentrate
2 cups strawberries (cleaned, hulled and cut into quarters)
2 cups raspberries
2 cups blueberries
4 cups bottled lemon juice
6 cups sugar

Place berries and lemon juice in your big stock pot and heat up (if this mixture boils it is going to start turning in to jam, you only want it warm enough to dissolve the sugar.) Once it's nice and warm, stir in the sugar. Heat long enough to be sure the sugar is completely dissolved.

The Canning Homeade site has directions for presserving the lemonade in a wter bath. If you want to do that, then your lemonade needs to be heated to 190 degrees. I desided to freeze mine, so I skipped that.

When reconstituting the lemonade,  I like 1 part concentrate to 3 to 4 parts water or club soda.  So far club soda is my favorite!  Sprite was pretty good too, but it was a lot sweeter. If I had it to do over, I would have mixed it at least 5 to 1.

We can't get enough of this Lemonade! Since I found this recipe, we mix up a batch for every special meal and most of our guests.

 

Connor the camera man!