Almost There

18 pints of fresh tomato soup are cooling off in the pressure canner now, which is almost the end of the tomatoes.  And frees up a box:

I think the wink is because now I'm wondering if he also felt the need to be in there when it was full of tomatoes.  I wash them and peel them, of course, but after spending all day making tomato soup, the last thing I want to think about is a cat sitting on them.

I still have a few green tomatoes, and at least 30 pounds of frozen tomatoes, but I could use another 20 pounds to make tomato soup later in the week and be done with canning for the year, or I could just can tomatoes in the pressure canner which could take up slightly more than 20 pounds of tomatoes.  The end is in sight!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Good News And the Bad News

The good news is, we now have 17 pints of home made beef stew canned and ready for winter:

The bad news is, it was supposed to be 14 pints, and when the dreadfully unhelpful recipe said to "add enough boiling water to cover" the other ingredients, I covered them too much so we have more of a soup than a stew.  Not to mention leftovers that didn't fit into the canner, and what better way to round off a 91-degree day of canning when one has forgotten to close the windows and turn the air conditioning on than with a nice hot bowl of stew? 

I need this no-processed-foods thing to extend my life--I need the extra time to can.

Where There's A Will...........

I think I've mentioned before that I grew up on a cattle ranch, which my family still operates.  This means that I grew up eating beef.  LOTS of it.  I don't think many people made a really decent living at it, but one does eat well, and there's a lot to be said for knowing where one's food is coming from.

However, there are things that are very, very different living this way.  For one thing, one doesn't just "order up" food as one would like it.  One deals with things as they come.  For instance, if a cow gets hit by a car, one calls out the mobile butcher and gets 700+ pounds of very lean ground beef.  It's either that or take a $1000 loss, which would be silly.  However, it's a rather big adjustment to suddenly have a whole bunch of meat one didn't expect and wasn't planning on.  As you can imagine, my family owns some REALLY big freezers.

This year when selling the steers, 11 of them got turned back for improper marking.  That was a bit of a surprise.  The ranch has started keeping a few steers to sell directly to consumers, but 2-3 is a lot different than 11.  Since there are 4 kids from the ranch (my sister and I and two cousins), the ranch very generously gave us each a side of beef (one half an animal) and we just had to pay for the cutting and wrapping.  This is a fantastic deal, but the ranch didn't have adequate feed set aside for 11 1000-pound animals which it wasn't expecting, so there was a time crunch involved.  I had been diligently cleaning out space in our freezers and had waited as long as we could before picking up our meat, but when I picked it up on Monday and brought it home, we discovered it was MUCH more than we expected.  I spent the rest of Monday cleaning out the freezers, digging out things we could use immediately, and improvising a "frozen vegetable du jour" crock pot soup (which turned out REALLY well, I might add), and rearranging everything.  I found room for everything except 4 big 4-pound packages of soup bones, so:

 it was time to learn to can beef broth.  Thank heavens for this big stock pot, and I have some great canning books which walked me through the whole process, but I do wish they might have found a nicer way to walk me through a key step than "skim the scum off the top."  I realize I need to be much tougher for this lifestyle, but who wants "scum" on something they're going to consume?  Of course, it turns out that was the good part, because the next step after letting the stock chill overnight was to "defat" it:

Now that term I like, and if given the chance I would "defat" my thighs in a nanosecond.  It took a while to figure out a good way to do this, but finally I found a way to work it:

The huge stock pot is really great, but it would be even better if my kitchen utensils were long enough to straddle the thing.  Oh well--this worked, and I was really pretty shocked that this:

is all I ended up with from a quadruple stock recipe.  Not all of that is fat--most of it is actually sediment.  I guess the whole point of a soup bone (which I'm thinking is actually leg) is that is really from a tough, well-exercised part of the steer so it wouldn't have much fat, but I was thankful all the same.  I'm not quite tough enough to face an entire block of just chilled fat--not even if it's butter, no matter WHAT Julia Child says. 

After a two day process (one to make the broth, overnight to cool, then canning the next day), we have beef broth!

I think the final count was 6 quarts, 9 pints, and some that needs to be frozen into ice cubes.  I have six more packages of soup bones to deal with, but I think that sounds like a project to start tomorrow..............

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. 

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..............