Home Canning, Part III

After last's year's inaugural run of home canning, we learned a very important lesson--not all home canned goods are worth the effort. We were trying all sorts of crazy things like pickles, salsa, and spaghetti sauce, all of which we ended up throwing away. This year, we decided that we should just keep it simple.

On Saturday we went to the farmer's market in Old Towne Alexandria, and haggled our way to a great price on heirloom tomatoes and peaches. Okay, haggling might be a bit strong of a word. Really, we asked the farmer if we were to buy a whole box of peaches, if he'd give us a deal--and he said, "Sure. I'll give you 25 lbs. for $20 bucks." In case you haven't priced out peaches lately, that is a very good deal. (They were originally $2.29/lb) We did the same with the tomato dealer--we got 12.5 lbs of tomatoes for a steal!

So this year's canning went much smoother than last year. All we had to do was blanche, peel, and stuff in the can. Easy peasy!

We started by putting all the peaches in the fridge. It looked pretty cool, so I took a picture.

And here are our tomatoes. They look funny because they were grown to taste good (rather than ship well). We have been fully indoctrinated on the importance of buying locally grown food.

So Here I am about to put the peeled tomatoe into the bowl. (Note: I woke up and walked directly out into the kitchen for our canning adventure, so if I don't look quite as beautiful as usual, pray forgive.)

Then Justin took them from the bowl and put them in the cans. He wore his red shirt just in case he spilled. (He has maybe had a few tomato drips down his shirt recently.)


And now it's on to the peaches. Tip: If you cut an "X" into the peach or tomato before blanching, it makes it really easy to peel.

Peeling the peaches is fun to do, fun to do, to do, to do...

The tomatoes are done! But what happened to the 5th can? I swear we put 5 cans into the steam bath...

How sad! The bottom blew off the jar, so we lost 1/5 of our tomatoes.

But it turns out we had way more peaches than we anticipated.

All in all, we ended up with 4 jars of tomatoes and 13 jars of peaches, and it only took 3.5 hours from start to all cleaned up and blogged about. It should be a peachy winter!

Adventures in Home Canning, Part II

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.

Adventures in Home Canning

The other day Justin asked me, "Bethany, if we get married, can we have turkeys?" and I asked myself, "Who am I dating?" Actually, I didn't really ask that, but I responded with a firm no. He then asked if we could just have a chicken coop instead. Again I had to make sure that we were very clear from the outset that I am not okay with livestock in my backyard.

Justin has been reading a book called Animal, Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver which is about her family's experiment with only eating locally grown food. Since he started reading the book, he's started buying all his produce from the farmer's market--a good choice, but that's just where it started. Now he's decided to learn how to make cheese, he's considering buying a bread machine and wants to slaughter his own meat. (Man, I hope Justin is cool with me sharing his bazaar new passions in such an open forum...oh well, it's adorable, so how could he possibly object?) On top of that, he decided that he needs to learn how to can his locally grown produce himself, so we spent last Saturday in a grand canning adventure.

It started with Justin happily canning some pickles, and me excitedly peeling tomatoes.

It turns out, however, that you can only peel so many tomatoes before the joy of it wears off. We peeled a little more than 50 pounds. It also turns out that canning is kind of a messy process.




I also think that we had been a little over-zealous in the scope of our canning adventure. We decided to can pickles (6 quarts), tomatoes (7 quarts), salsa (3 quarts) and spaghetti sauce (3 quarts) and we were going to do peaches at well, but apparently peach season ended the week before and the farmer's market was fresh out of peaches. (By the way, we were very disappointed to discover that a box and a half of tomatoes only produced 3 quarts of spaghetti sauce...and this was supposed to be cost-effective?) But after 7 hours, we were pretty proud of our accomplishment. We were also very sweaty. Imagine a poorly air conditioned room on the 3rd floor with five large pots of water boiling constantly for 7 hours, and you will understand why we were sweating.



So after we finished, we started cleaning up, and for the first time in an apparently really long time, looked down at the floor. It was really dirty, so I decided to mop. The look I was going for with this picture was "Wow, that's a digustingly dirty floor. " I think the look that I actually got was "Watch me squint my eyes and show you my teeth." I guess my dreams of becoming America's next top model may not ever come to fruition.


And here's a look at how dirty the floor really was...

In the end, I think we decided that unless you grow the food yourself, it's really more cost-effective (and time-effective) to buy canned vegetables in the store. An important lesson for anyone to learn.

What random adventures have you had recently? Please share!