Canning Chronicles - Pressure Canning

As mentioned last week, I bought a pressure canner at Farm and Fleet. So this weekend I was going to get down to business and use it!

The problem was I only had about 10 tomatoes from my own 3 tomato plants:


My backup, Rick's garden, was hit hard by the heavy rains and resulting tomato splitting. This meant not much of a harvest there.

I found a pick your own vegetables farm: http://www.thetreefarm.org/

Rick and I went together. It was AMAZING! There is no reason to feel guilty ever again that I don't grow enough of my own vegetables. In fact, there was a lot of guilt about the amount of veggies going bad in the field.

I had a great time. Rick had a great time. Possibly too much of a good time. The receipt says we bought:

Tomatoes: 61 lbs, Cabbage 12 lbs, Cucumbers 6 lbs, Hot peppers 6lbs, 4 eggplants, 1 Bittermelon (anyone know what this is or what to do with it???) and then something I can't identify on the receipt: HOTY 11.3 lbs.

Besides being a bear to carry up the stairs into the kitchen (why can't I figure out how to make the dogs into pack animals?), ummm, what in the world was I thinking... 61lbs of tomatoes!

Rick and I spent Saturday evening doing the exact same thing over and over and over:
1) wash tomatoes
2) blanch tomatoes in boiling water
3) plunge tomatoes into ice water (note for you want to be canners: you need a lot of ice. If you run out of ice, those frozen ice packs do just fine. If those all get defrosted on you, then feel free to use the multicolored plastic ice that came with your summer cocktail mixing set.)
4) peel tomatoes and core them
5) chop tomatoes
6) cook tomatoes into a sauce

Some pictures from our processing night:



Sunday - ah, the easy part, right? canning.
Here is what I did - (after going to Farm and Fleet to get 2 more cases of jars, 5 gallons of cider vinegar, a Tide sized box of canning salt, mustard seed and dill seed)
1) start sterilizing jars in dishwasher
2) start huge vat of boiling water
3) clean cucumbers for pickles (those buggers get real dirty)
4) set all clean cans out on "canning station" table
4.5) feel good about how beautiful everything is in my kitchen
5) start heating up all the tomato sauces, salsas and stewed tomatoes from yesterday
5.5) remember that I have two cantelope that MUST be "processed" somehow today
6) get a bit overwhelmed at number of things on the counter!
7) cut cantelope, spread on baking sheet and put in freezer
8) cut up all the cucumbers, stuff into jars
8.5) get distressed about number of jars of cucumbers. There are two more jars than planned for! I fear some cucumbers aren't going to make it into the promised land of pickledom.




Once the cantelope departed into the freezer, and the sauces were boiling it was time to get started. Soon, the table of clean jars turned into this:

Notice that George and Deuce have morphed into vigilant jar herding dogs. They have rounded these all up into a tight pack. Only one was lost in the night to a poor seal.

At this point in the evening I am very proud of myself. and exhausted.

The most beautiful picture and yet the most depressing still awaits. The remaining bounty:


this is all still sitting on my table. I was too tired to do anything with them...oh, and my original tomatoes on the porch are still out there too! eek.

The final haul:
6 P and 1 Q of dill pickles
3 Q of spaghetti sauce
9 P of salsa (4 mild and 5 spicy)-all yellow
8 Q of stewed tomatoes (and 1 pint of lonely leftovers from each pot :)
3 Ziploc bags of frozen cantelope

The casualties: 1 broken glass jar, 1 quart jar of pickles had to be thrown away (lack of dill seed, never doing that again!),

Leftovers: more salt and cider vinegar than I know what to do with, all those vegetables on the table, hot peppers (Rick is going to make a sauce of some sort. I was pretty exasperated as he picked 6 lbs of tiny little hot peppers, I wasn't going to delve too far into what his plans were for them), and then of course the mysterious 11lbs of HOTY.

Final call- Fun, very fun. But could be enhanced by breaking it out over a couple more days, and including wine and some friends to entertain me.