I wasn’t in love with home canning at first. It was the winter following the summer I learned to can that I fell in love with canning. This hasn’t been all that long ago–less than ten years. It was snowing and we didn’t go to the grocery store as we’d planned. I made spaghetti and instead of a salad to accompany the spaghetti, we had green beans. The spaghetti was topped with my sauce and the green beans were from the jars on top of the cabinets — all from the summer before.
Those green beans not only looked good on top of my cabinets — they were good. I thought…I did this!
I then read a great book by Barbara Kingsolver called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and I realized how beneficial it is to eat local food. I love that book…if you haven’t read it, you should! The library has the book and the CD.
On Saturday, I started this post describing my excitment over canning tomatoes. I realize it appears I have a small life to be excited about canning tomatoes, but if you haven’t tried canning, it’s difficult to understand the satisfaction achieved from preserving your own food. I think that many of us are still “wired” to want to gather and prepare for winter — even though Food City and Kroger are doing a pretty good job of taking over this responsibility!
Anyway, I canned 65 pints of homemade spaghetti sauce and 12 quarts of tomatoes — right at 100 pounds of tomatoes. The spaghetti sauce grew challenging as I grew more tired. I started yesterday and did not finish completely until 5 pm today. I had to scald the tomatoes to get the skins off. Then I had to skin and core them and put them in my handy KitchenAid food processor which I’d researched last winter in preparation for its use in dicing tomatoes Great job! Once I got about 20 cups of the diced tomatoes, I added seasonings and placed the mixture on the stove to simmer for 25 minutes. AFTER that, it was into the jars and then into the pressure canner for 40 minutes. The worst part about this whole process besides a sea of red sticky mess was waiting for the pressure canner to cool off enough to open and remove the jars.
I’m not complaining. I have a pantry full of wonderful, yummy stuff that I’ll be quite smug about this winter. I’m droning. Here’s a few pictures.
Aren’t these girls pretty? They are in the “hot tub” getting scalded. Ouch.
Sue Cressel a nurse practitioner and friend taught me to can. She went strictly by the Ball Canning Book. This was 8 or 9 summers ago, and she and I canned 168 quarts of green beans along with many pints of tomatoes, pasta sauce and salsa. My right elbow hurt from breaking beans. I am not sure why I did not learn from my mother…I think she saw me more as a bean breaker than a bean canner.
So…much of the weekend, I was looking down into a simmering pot of this…
Even though I was busy in the kitchen, I tried to do other things during the “down” time when things were on the stove. In the country, there is always something to do. If we’re bored, we can go out and mow grass.
However, I did laundry as we’d had company all week. I hang my sheets out to dry. I have two washing machines, so I can zip through the laundry by using both machines and the clothesline and the dryer. The sheets smell really good, but this has its hazards. From above, the birds can poop on them, and if I hang them too low, the cat runs up and pees on them. That red sheet is definitely in the danger zone.
It’s always something. And how has your weekend been?
