And We Have.....

a SECOND batch of green tomato salsa, to follow up on Monday's canned tomatoes and double batch of chunky basil pasta sauce.  Unfortunately,

there are still lots and lots and lots of tomatoes.  I keep telling myself that the overabundance is really a GOOD thing because between my father's illness and my back issues, I didn't do much canning last year, and our summers are only going to get hotter and hotter, making it harder to grow a garden every year, but I am still getting a bit tired of the tomatoes.  Most of my tomato plants are actually still alive, but we're not discussing that. 

Since I canned yesterday and had a miserable back day on Tuesday, I'm not canning today.  I have physical therapy at noon, and I'm guessing it will be one of those painful working-out-the-kinks sessions.  So maybe the tomatoes and I will spend some time together over the weekend.  Or maybe I have enough room in the freezer for more red ones and can ignore the silly things until Monday...............

Fingers Crossed

Canning hit a bit of a snag this week when I was flattened with a cold, but I'm hoping to tackle those tomatoes again tomorrow. 

This

is one of this year's most hopeful experiments:  Roasted Poblano Salsa.  Like most canned salsa, it was quite nasty to taste before it went in the jars, but I'm hoping that those roasted poblano peppers will live up to our expectations after this has time to mellow for a bit.  Poblano peppers are my favorite hot peppers--probably because they are the least hot of the "hot" peppers.  That gives them lots of flavor with less eye-watering.  Dried, they're called "chile ancho,"  though I haven't tried drying any yet.  With 8 poblano plants, this might be the year to try.........

Let The Canning Games Begin!

It's impossible to say yet whether this will be a good or bad year for tomatoes as it's still early and a few of the plants missed the first fruiting, but I have been washing the early tomatoes and popping them in the freezer until I had enough for

This is a tomato-basil simmer sauce, which I don't think I've made before, and which had the same problems all the BHG canning recipes and I have:  even if I go way over the supposed "cook-until-thick" time, I still end up with more sauce than I'm supposed to.  In 80 minutes of simmering, it was supposed to cook down to around 11 cups.  This is what I ended up with after 95 minutes.  Oh well.  It's perhaps a bit thinner than I wanted, but the recipe said a variation was to add some chopped dried tomatoes right before canning, so I did, which should absorb some of the extra moisture.  And this time I had extra jars prepared--which is probably a first for me. 

I have my first follow-up appointment with the physiatrist today, then I hope to have enough time to can a few pickles tonight.  Canning season is underway!

Two And A Half Days of Canning Later.....

12 1/2 pints of salsa
3 1/2 pints of tomatoes
10 pints of beef stock
3 1/2 half-pints of lemon-sage mustard
6 half-pints of zucchini pickles

............and such a big mess in the kitchen that if I wanted to make it bigger, I would need to borrow dishes from the neighbors!

It's The First Weekend of Canning!

*  I must remember to check the seed packets to figure out what the heck the itty-bitty miniature bell peppers are supposed to be.

*  Nothing makes me forgive the garden quicker than finally getting enough cucumbers to make pickles.

*  I do think our no-processed-foods diet will make us live longer.  Of course, I'll be spending that extra time canning.

*  Next time I say I'm giving the zucchini Miracle Grow, I expect my friends to stage an intervention.

*  It would probably be a good idea to decide while planting whether or not I'll be working during canning season.  I am foreseeing some very cranky/exhausted Sunday nights.

*  It might be much smarter to start harvest season with an empty freezer, but having one bursting at the seams is so much more challenging..........

*  I have learned to kick off canning season with the things I really want--salsa and pickles.  I don't know anyone who would really get excited about more relish.

Not Yet

There may be a day when I can use the pressure canner without fear of blowing up my kitchen, but I'm not there yet.  I do, however, no longer yearn for protective gear while canning.

This is the Plan

The biggest problem with canning--well, besides that all that standing being what actually uncovered the hip problem that resulted in the emergency room saga--is that one needs lots of storage space if one has lots of jars.  Since I was incapacitated at the time, Andy rearranged the storage space underneath the stairs, and got all the jars put away:

In other years, I have put flats of jars away as they were filled, but that left me with rummaging around through entire flats of jam or salsa while looking for something totally different--like relish.  This year I thought it might be easier to mix jars up into flats of things that might be needed around the same time.  So, yesterday I pulled out one of the flats

and moved all but a few jars into our pantry.  Admittedly, one does not always need a new jar of green tomato chutney, but carrot salsa is always nice to have on hand, and the roasted red pepper spread is simply a treasure.  So, I think this is good.  The one problem is, of course, if one had something specific in mind--like the salsa I was actually after when I crawled into the closet in the first place.  In that scenario, it's a bit like the scavenger hunt from hell.  I'm thinking that I just need to change my expectations a bit.  While I might have had taco salads in mind, when one finds roasted garlic pasta sauce and has some pasta to put it on and has a green side salad with it, one still has lunch.  I have decided to just treat this as my own personal Iron Chef contest, and shall just hope that the flats with the more unusual items--piccalilli relish and green tomato chutney--are well spread out throughout the crawl space. 

All Mixed Up

Today I am canning red tomatoes.  The green tomatoes we picked a couple weeks ago have been happily ripening here in the kitchen, so I should be able to put up another 10-15 pints.  As I cook with a lot of canned tomatoes, this really, really is a good thing--even if I have no greater desire right now than to take the canners outside and beat them into pancakes with a sledgehammer.  With only one income, one of the reasons we tell ourselves that gardening is a good idea is that it saves us money.  I think it actually might even do so--my future therapy bills not withstanding.  In all actuality, because jars can be reused and we eat a lot of salsa and I eat a lot of pickles, I think the garden pays for itself with just those two items, but now every additional jar of tomatoes I get from the garden saves us about $1.25-$1.50.  So while today's $15 or whatever doesn't seem like much, it's all extra now.  We've spent all we're spending on the garden for the year, and every extra can of tomatoes is pure "gravy" right now as it were.  This sort of thinking is what saves me from running down the street screaming and throwing tomatoes at passing cars.

Because the climate has changed so much, I am still canning while it would be very helpful to be able to eat some of the things I have made.  Usually, this overlap doesn't happen as there's still fresh stuff.  Unlike past years, so far I haven't flipped out entirely at the mere mention of OPENING a jar, and we've even enjoyed some lovely chicken soup.  Today I am using some of the basil pesto that has basically overrun one of the freezers.  The fact that I need the freezer space in order to freeze the extra vegetable broth might have something to do with it.  But being in an opening AND canning mode is very, very weird.  I think it would be wisest, however, for no one to go near those darn jars of canned tomatoes just yet..........

Lessons Learned Today

*  Celebrate the small things.  Having solved the problem of cornmeal and polenta being mixed up is an achievement.  That the new corn-products-all-over-the-floor-of-the-pantry-problem has not been resolved yet is an entirely separate issue.

*  Being proud of oneself for finally thinking to buy a restaurant-sized stockpot for canning would make a lot more sense if one had thought to buy a spoon with a restaurant-sized handle.

*  Making a double batch of vegetable broth to can would make far more sense if one figured out ahead of time how to strain broth if its volume exceeds everything you own except the stockpot it's already IN, and whether or not the subsequent number of jars also exceeds the capacity of the pressure canner.

*  No matter how many problems one encounters, it's hard to have a bad day when there is chocolate-peanut butter ice cream involved.

*  The fact that I'm always surprised when the lawn-care program we signed up for notifies me that something else needs to be done to the lawn is probably the best illustration of why we NEED a lawn care program.

*  Ignoring the green tomatoes hasn't made them go away, but at least it makes them turn red.

*  No matter how this vegetable broth turns out, the fact that it is the last thing I'm making with the pressure canner this year makes it my favorite canned thing EVER!

Piccalilli Relish

 Of course I didn't make piccalilli relish just because it is fun to say.

I made it because it used a few of our overwhelming green tomato harvest,

AND it's fun to say.

Preservatives Would Certainly Be Easier

I grew up using those little red and yellow bullion cubes, and while they're really, REALLY salty, I can understand why they were such a hit.  Because this

is the alternative, and it takes about 5 1/2 hours.  Thankfully, 4 hours of it is "simmering," but it does make one plan ahead.  This is vegetable stock, which doesn't taste nearly as good as the chicken stock I made for the homemade chicken soup, but this also didn't involve mangling a chicken carcass, and there's a LOT to be said for that. 

Thursday........

Um, yeah....deciding to can roasted red pepper spread AND chicken soup in the same day isn't a stupid idea at all.................

Things To Do When One Has A Cold.......

Thanks to our insane temperature swings (90 on Sunday, into the 40s the last few days), I have developed a cold in addition to seasonal allergies, so it seemed a good time to make some lemon-sage mustard.

This part:

(steeping fresh sage leaves in white wine) smells okay, but this part:

(cooking the mustard until it thickens) stinks.  It's possible that it might have healing powers, as people used to treat colds or flu or bronchitis with mustard plasters, but that might be one of those home-remedies that never really worked but was so awful everyone thought it must do SOMETHING.  Personally, having experienced at least one during my childhood, I have always been convinced that it was either to make sure kids weren't faking illness in order to miss school, or that one felt so good to have the mustard plaster removed that  one felt the illness had improved.  Either way,

we have 3 jars of some really good mustard, but I still have a cold...........

Another Day of Canning

Even though Theo is completely appalled that I would spend yet another day doing something he can't help with,

I'd found red bell peppers for a great price at our locally-owned grocery store, and had been wanting to make roasted red bell pepper spread ever since I saw the recipe.   We haven't tasted it yet, but when you start with this:

how could anything be bad?

It's another one of those that you "cook until thickened," and since I never seem to get it right I cooked it for about 10 minutes longer than I was supposed to,

 partly just because it made the house smell wonderful, and

I still ended up with WAY more sauce than I was supposed to.  Is it just me, or do you really think there's any way one would get 6 pounds of roasted peppers into 5 8-ounce jars?  I got 11.

The peppers didn't take very long (in canning terms), so I decided I'd have plenty of time to make another batch of vegetable soup--especially since I was now feeling pretty confident about the pressure canner.  This time I was prepared for the overwhelming volume:

having found a massive stockpot at a restaurant supply store.  They had much larger versions,  but I decided it I was ever making anything that was too large to fit into a 26-quart stockpot, an intervention would be necessary.

Vegetable soup takes a lot of chopping, and the beans had to be soaked and precooked, and by the time I was done I felt like I'd worked all day long, but I was actually finished with this

AND had washed all the dishes by the time Andy was finished with work.  16 more jars of vegetable soup, so now we have 31 jars of this and 9 jars of chicken soup for winter.  For 3 day's work, we have 40 meals ready-to-eat, which has been the hardest part of trying to eliminate commercially processed foods from our diet.  I had lightened up enough in the last year to allow commercial soup when we were sick or really tired, but it was only until I could do something else, as the list of salts and additives--and the disappointing taste--was always a problem.  If I am still going strong on canning next week, I'm going to try a double-batch of chicken soup now that I have the big stockpot.  It's probably a REALLY good thing I didn't decide to buy the next size up...........

Quick--What Would You Like To Eat For The Next Year?

In trying to live without processed foods, this is the Question of the Moment here at Chateau Sutton-Goar.  The tomatoes are FINALLY on,

but still not as strongly as they were at this time two years ago, so now the questions begin.  What tomato canned goods are our highest priority?  How many will we need?  Do we want to use some tomatoes for new recipes or stick with the old?  If we run short of tomatoes again, what could we be most likely to buy without forbidden ingredients?

I've already canned about half of the vegetable salsa we use in a year

(Can you tell it's one of our favorites?)  I'll still need to make our signature carrot salsa supply for the year, and perhaps some roasted tomatillo-chipotle salsa.  

We did decide to try a few new recipes this year, so we now have 7 pints and 6 half-pints of roasted garlic tomato sauce:

which smelled wonderful while cooking, but is probably not nearly as thick as it is supposed to be, as even after "cooking until reduced by 1/3," I still ended up a lot more than the recipe said it would make, so I'm guessing they probably used Roma or some other paste-type tomatoes.  I have Romas growing, but we have such a short growing season that most of my tomatoes every year are Early Girls.  We just don't have time for anything else to really get going.

Of course, not everything in the garden is a tomato, so I have been making and freezing pesto and ice cubes of chopped fresh basil, and Saturday I made and froze three batches of this:

Andy discovered a wonderful recipe for green poblano rice that I love so much that I planted about 12 poblano pepper plants.  Even after me killing a bunch of them in the transplanting process--and Theo taking out a couple in a process we aren't going to discuss--I have a lot of wonderful mild chilies in the garden.  To make the rice, one chops up a couple poblanos in water or broth, to cook for a while, then purees them with some cilantro and salt--then you would cook the rice in the new vivid green liquid.  I made 4 batches and froze 3 right after pureeing, so all we'll have to do is add the rice and cook.  Of course, AFTER doing all of this, it occurred to me that I could have actually only used half the liquid in order to save space in the freezer, leaving half the liquid to be added with the rice, but there are a lot of peppers out there.  Next time......

I also grow a lot of jalapeno peppers so I can use them when I make salsa, but in order to have enough to make salsa, one really needs quite a few pepper plants, which means one also has lots of jalapenoes when one isn't trying to make salsa.  So...

I now have 6 jars of pickled jalapenoes.  I made these two years ago when I had a big jalapeno crop (they didn't do well with last year's cold and wet summer either), and Andy loved them.  Since he likes things hot and I don't really care much for the pickled jalapenoes, this year I left the seeds in to add a bit more heat.  

And I am happy to report that yesterday's soup adventure,

was hot but successful, and we now have 16 pints of vegetable soup.  There was a little left over after filling all the jars, and it was amazingly good stuff.  I'm a little less terrified of the pressure canner each time I use it, though I still am more comfortable with the traditional water-bath canning process.  Now that we've had most of the jars and all the canning equipment for a couple years, we're finally starting to see the return on investment in all of this.  If we were to buy 16 cans of soup (most of which are no long 16 ounces as my jars are but 13 to 14 ounces and shrinking), it would be approximately $1.50 to $2.50 a can.  So, I made about $32 worth of soup yesterday.  Of course, if you factor in the time spent in gardening and planting and canning, it's probably about $1000 worth of soup, but we're going to focus on the no artificial ingredients or chemical additives angle at that point.........

I Am Canning Soup!

And if you don't hear from me again, it will probably mean that I put a skylight in the kitchen with the pressure canner..............

We Have Spiced Red Cabbage

And I have learned a new lesson in the process:

If a canning recipe creates EIGHT cups of brine, and that brine is 

supposed--by some miracle--to fill five QUART jars, even packed as tightly with cabbage as they can be--the writer OF

said recipe either stinks at math or has a sadistic

sense of humor.

Just sayin'...............

Um.....

So the recipe SAID it would make 10 half-pint jars of salsa and I ended up with 20 half-pint jars of salsa. How is that even possible??? I double-checked EVERYTHING, and it said to "cook until thickened," or about an hour. I cooked it for a little OVER an hour and I still got double what it said.

Thank heavens we already know we like this salsa. 20 jars!!!

Just Do It

I think it might have been about a year ago--maybe a bit less, but not by much--I ordered a pressure canner. I wanted to be able to can low-acid foods like pumpkin and vegetable broth, but ever since it arrived, I've been afraid to use it. Who hasn't seen cartoons or television clips of a pressure cooker or canner exploding? The instruction book didn't really help my fears any--the safety instructions cover about 3 pages.

However, Tuesday I finally decided I was being silly (not to mention, the pumpkins were stacking up), and decided to get the thing out and do a test run. No jars or food--just water.
Ta-da! No explosions! I got it up to 15 pounds of pressure, held it steady for about 5 minutes, then turned it off to let it cool down on.

It was then 4:00 PM--at which time a sane person would have said, "Great, I'm ready for tomorrow."

What I said was, " Heck, it's still early. I can get the pumpkin done tonight."

At 11:00 PM, I had finally canned 17 pints of pumpkin, and had a bowl full of cubed pumpkin leftovers in the fridge. The actual processing time was an hour, but even with heating them in the oven briefly before hand, peeling, seeding, and cubing 7 pumpkins takes considerably longer. I would have sworn 10 hours, but I know that really can't be possible. It felt like it, though.

Yesterday, the garden and I were not even on speaking terms, but today:
two trays of small tomatoes in the dehydrator, and 12 pints of crushed tomatoes. So I think I'm all caught up for at least 5 days.

Whoo hoo!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Today's Edition of Not-so-Little House On The Prarie....

Being Labor Day and a "day off" here in America, I really REALLY wasn't going to can anything today, but it was 50 degrees this morning when we got up, and while I steadfastly refuse to turn the heat on in September, standing near a warm stove for a few hours suddenly seemed like a pretty good idea, so.....

We now have 15 pints of tomato sauce. Not ordinary tomato sauce like you buy in a store. This recipe called for zucchini (yay!), carrots, bell peppers, onions, garlic, celery, and a whole bunch of spices--as well as red wine and red wine vinegar. Hello--how could I pass that up? It even called for a little bit of cinnamon, which I have always thought added a nice touch to tomato sauces. I was a bit confused though, because in my universe, a "tomato sauce" would not really have a whole bunch of chunky vegetables, and it said to "cook until thick" which wasn't really happening, so I dug out the food processor and ran some of the vegetables through it. It still has some chunky little veggie bits, but it looks more like something I would call tomato "sauce."

There was a little sauce leftover, so I made pizza tonight and used it as pizza sauce, and I think it's better than the pizza sauce recipe I canned last year which is seriously unfortunate as the pizza sauce was a much easier recipe. Figures. Still, it was pretty marvelous pizza......maybe I could make it through another 15 pints in a week or so....

Have you ever had to figure out what you'll want to eat a YEAR in advance?????