The LAST batch!

Wahoo! I have peeled my last tomato of 2012!

My last batch of tomatoes for this season was 14 quarts of Italian Style Stewed Tomatoes.

All I can say now, is BRING ON THE APPLES!!!

Grandma Jeppson's Chili Sauce

The voices woke me early this morning. So by 4:30 A.M. I was pealing tomatoes for chili sauce.

My beloved Grandma Perry, who was a pretty great cook, made terrible pot roast. All my life, I've heard that the only thing that made her roast edible was her mother's chili sauce.  This is my first attempt.

Grandma Jeppson's Chili Sauce

• 36 large tomatoes
• 6 large onions
• 4 large green peppers
• 2 cups vinegar
• 2 cups sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp cloves
• 1 tsp allspice
• 2 tsp cinnamon

All this boiled down to 14 pints, which I water bathed for 30 minutes.

Shane I and completed 18 quarts of (very thin) crushed tomatoes last Saturday.

Today we are putting up our beets.  We found that it takes about 10 to 12 pounds of beets to fill 7 quarts. We're using Karla's recipe:

Pickled Beet Brine:

10 cups beet water

2 cups vinegar

3 cups sugar

1 TB salt

To process, we cold packed the jars and pored the boiling brine over the beets. Then we water bathed them for 30 minutes.

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

Pear Preserves

On a whim I picked a case of pears last week. I was able to get a canner load of pear jam (recipe from pectin pack) and 7 delicious quarts of Pear Preserves.

The Preserves are so so so yummy. Delicious on toast, biscuits and oatmeal.

This season's first batch of crushed tomatoes is in the water bath right NOW!

Harvest Time!

The last 2 weeks have been full of corn and tomatoes.

We pressure canned 32 pints of corn and cut the kernels off of scads and scads of ears to freeze.  I found the directions for both in my Ball Blue Book.  The frozen corn looks great and I can't wait to enjoy the taste of corn on the cob this winter.

I haven't tried the bottled corn yet, but it doesn't look very appetizing.  After spending 55 minutes under pressure it looks pretty beat up and, if I'm being honest, a little brown. I don't think I'll be bottling corn again.

Just a side note: This is what happens when you leave your computer unattended while writing a post.     this is connor speaking. bring me hot chocolate.

Tomatoes and peppers are starting to trickle in. I was able to scrap up enough to make a double batch of Chile Salsa. The direction says to combine all the ingredients and "heat to boil, and simmer 10 minutes."  I don't really understand why the extension office recommends this.  All salsa recipes say to simmer for 10 to 20 minutes. I followed theses directions the first year I made salsa and ended up with jar after jar of thin, watery salsa. 

I cooked this mixture down all day long and got a nice thick, yummy salsa.  As a matter of fact, Chili Salsa is probably the best salsa I've ever made. My only complaint is it's lack of garlic.

P.S. I'm sorry for all the errors in this post. Connor is relentlessly campaigning for the computer, because he wants to play Webkinz. I can't concentrate any more!

Mint

The first time I tired to grow mint was in three indoor pots.  We basically loved those plants to death. We loved the mint so much that we over harvested and killed those poor plants. From that experience, I got it in my head that I couldn't grow mint.

This summer I planted mint in our herb garden, with little hope that it would live. Imagine my surprise when the mint plant not only lived, but started spreading out and taking over! I now have a beautiful, healthy and delicious mint plant growing in our herb garden.

About once a week I have been able to harvest a big bowl full.  There is always a pitcher of mint and water in our fridge, just waiting to refresh the hot, overworked gardeners that live here.   I have also been preserving the mint by freezing it into ice cubes. So we'll have mint water to drink in the winter.

Yesterday I got the crazy idea to make mint jelly.  I'm not sure if it will be good or how we'll use it.

 But it sure looks pretty!

If the timing works out, and I still have mint when the peppers come on, I'd like to make a batch of jalapeno mint jelly as well.

This season's 1st batch of salsa

It's early yet for salsa. So I was tickled pink the other day, when I was gifted 10 very ripe tomatoes from our community garden. Because it was such a small amount, I googled "small batch canning recipes" and came across the Fiesta Salsa Small Batch recipe at the Ball site.

Because this salsa was intended for fresh eating, (Note: If I had meant for this salsa to be processed and shelf stable, I would have follow the recipe exactly!) I changed the recipe up a bit. I added about 1/2 an onion and a jalapeno. The recipe calls for 1 tablespoon vinegar, but I added about 3 and I cooked the mixture down for way longer than the recipe called for. I wanted a nice thick dipping salsa.

The results are exactly what we have been craving! Nothing beats homemade salsa!

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.

Canning Dry Beans

This weekend, Shane and I put up 7 quarts of kidney beans. Note: Before I started canning my dry beans I would be forever deciding I wanted beans for dinner too late to get them soaked and cooked. This way they are ready to go any time I want them.

Last time we processed beans, we followed the instructions in the Blue Book, and ended up swimming in par boiled beans. The recipe calls for 2 1/4 a pound dry beans per quart.  That is way Way WAY to much!!!

This time we did 3/4 a pound per quart and still had too many beans, but it wasn't nearly the disaster that the last time was.

I'd like to get another batch done this week. I think I'll go with 5 pounds for 7 quarts. We'll see how it goes.

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!