When you can pickles, you can't taste them right away. (It turns out that pickles are really just cucumbers.) You have to wait a couple of months so that the vinegar has time to work its magic. Justin and I decided that the time had finally come for us to try our home canning experiments. We started with the spaghetti sauce.
I was making stuffed pasta shells for dinner one night, and the recipe called for spaghetti sauce, so I decided to use one of our homemade cans. We had used the recipe from Barbara Kingsolver's book, the one that inspired all the domesticity in the first place. It turns out that while Kingsolver has written several good books, she doesn't really have a flare for writing recipes. The spaghetti sauce was nasty, and we dumped it all out.
Next we tried the pickles, with much the same result: it turned out they were nasty, and we dumped them all out.
After two disappointments already, we turned to the salsa without much hope. Even as we were canning it, we thought that there was a good chance we had chosen a terrible salsa recipe. The thing that clued us in to this was the apple cidar vinegar combined with 7 cloves of garlic. We were right. The salsa was terrible, and we dumped it out.
So what did we get out of more than 50 pounds of tomatoes and cucumbers? A mere 6 jars of tomatoes. Lessons learned: 1. Find a good recipe before you start canning. 2. Instead of canning, just go to the store and buy what you need.
