Oh, Darling, yes we can can.

It's been an epic year for canning at our house.  And with the projects Dave's mom and I have been working on in addition to ours, the cabinet is getting full pretty quick.  As I'm writing we've got hot pink applesauce made with cinnamon imperials in the waterbath.

We split the tomatoes and plain applesauce between everyone, but ended up with a bunch of jars of each, and then there's everything Dave and I did.

Our Tally this year so far:

Raspberry Wine Jelly - 10 4oz jars
Garlic Jelly - 6 half pints
Currant Jam - 5 4oz jars
No Sugar Strawberry Jam - 6 half pints
Strawberry Balsamic Jam - 6 half pints
Pickled Garlic - 7 half pints
Pickled Grapes - 1 half pints and 3 4oz jars
Garlic Green Hot Sauce - 1 half pint and 6 4oz jars
Tomato Red Hot Sauce - 1 half pint and 6 4oz jars
Mom's Apple Pie in a Jar - 6 half pints
Cinnamon Red Hot Applesauce - 7 pints  


And then there's the two big bags of pears and, I suspect quite a few more apples to deal with.  WOOOOO!  We're going to be busy.

Plus we're still working on eating things we canned last year.

(FYI - I am not willing to invite total strangers into my house, but as time allows, I will happily teach friends to can or make jam, pickles or applesauce.  I will probably ask you to buy your own jars, though.)

Hippy Trick: Vinegar Bath

Alright, so it's not a great picture, it's from my crummy cell phone, but bear with me here.  If you've found this post, you have internet and that means you have to have heard of using white vinegar for cleaning.

But did you know how easy it can be?

I hate very few things in this word, but one of the is mineral build up, on everything, because I have city water.  The tub faucet, the shower head, the kitchen sink sprayer, even my big stock pots I use for waterbath canning.

Easy fix?  White vinegar!

The picture above is my sink sprayer soaking in a glass of white vinegar.  I don't have a pic, but upstairs, the shower head is wrapped in a plastic baggie full of vinegar.

Let it soak a couple hours, good as new!

As for the stockpot?  2 Tablespoons of white vinegar every time I waterbath.  No more build up!

We have KRAUT!

So a couple months ago, we went to the farmer's market and brought home more cabbages than I could carry for about $10.  (Seriously, Dave had to carry them to and from the car.)  We feed them through the shredding blade of the food processor, along with a half a red cabbage from my Mom, by way of my Gramma, with more determination than you can possibly imagine.

This was set to be Sauerkraut, Round 2.

The first batch didn't have enough salt, as best as we can figure and when it got a little mold on top, which in and of itself isn't really a problem - you just skim it off, the mold quickly got below the brine level, below the weighted plate in the crock and into the cabbage before we realized what was happening.

Now if you're not a fan of sauerkraut because you think it's gross, you can't imagine how disgusting it is when it gets rotten like that.  If you are a fan of sauerkraut, let me say, the blue mold was a sight to behold.  And did it ever smell bad.

So this time around, we added way more salt.  I mean, like a pound of it.  We checked on it more often, We skimmed the beginnings of mold off and checked it some more.  We skimmed more mold and checked again and I'm happy to say, that today when we took the weighted plate off, what was underneath was in fact, actually sauerkraut!  It's a delightful shade of pink from the red cabbage and very salty, but it's sauerkraut!

I'm really excited, and actually need to finish this because the waterbath is finally hot enough to can it up!

Final Totals:  14 quarts in jars and 3 more in the freezer.

...and a Partridge in a Pear Tree.

or more like a big guy with a ponytail.  lol.

Years ago, my Grampa planted a couple of pear trees.  One of them is a dwarf pear of some kind and the other is, I think, a variety of seckel pear.  But Dave loves pears, and apparently we're the only ones who want to see the pears actually get eaten.

So, we went up 2 separate afternoons, and with some help from my dad and my sister, we picked all the pears (although there were only about 6 on the dwarf tree) and brought them home.  We ended up with 5 grocery bags of pears.  Not produce bags, grocery bags.

We made 4 jars of brandied pears.  We made 4 1/2 pints of pear butter with orange and ginger.  We made 6 jars of spiced pears.  We made 5 more jars of brandied pears.  We made 7 jars of cinnamon pear jam.  We canned pears in heavy syrup and I made a pear betty.  Unfortunately, we didn't get through all the pears before they started going bad, but we got all but the last 2 dozen or so preserved.

We're pretty proud of ourselves.  It was a huge project and took most of our free time for almost 2 weeks.  We ran out of canning jars.  We ran out of lids.  We ran out of space in the pantry.

Recipes:

Most of the recipes came from this site - Oregon State Extension Office.

http://extension.oregonstate.edu/fch/sites/default/files/documents/sp_50_678_preservingpears.pdf

Spiced Pears from Fresh Preserving 

Pear Jam from SUREJELL (we just added about a 1/2 Tablespoon of Cinnamon.)

Not that I expect you all to run out and get a whole tree worth of pears, but we are really enjoying these recipes, and in fact we just drank the leftover syrup from the brandied pears, and I thought I'd share them with everyone.

Bok Choy Fridge Pickles

We've been making loads of pickles this year.  Mostly cucumber fridge pickles.   Some processed ones.  A couple jars of pickled onions.  Then I saw on the Fresh Preserving Website...

BOK CHOY!

Bok Choy?  Really?  I like bok choy.  Let's try it.

So, I made it up as I went and this is what I got.

3 clean Pint Jars
1 head Bok Choy
1/3 tsp Chinese 5 Spice Powder (per jar)
1/4 tsp Crushed Red Pepper (per jar)

2 cups White Vinegar
1 cup Water
1 Tbsp Sugar
1 Tbsp Pickling or Non-Iodized Salt
1/2 piece Fresh Ginger Grated
2 cloves Garlic

Chop the Bok Choy stalks into roughly bite-sized pieces (save the leafy parts for stir fry!), and pack into pint jars, leaving about 1/2" headspace.  Add 5 Spice Powder and Crushed Red Pepper

Combine remaining ingredients in a small saucepan and heat until boiling.  Pour hot liquid over Bok Choy in jars, leaving about 1/2" headspace.  Make sure to distribute garlic between jars.  Add lids and refrigerate for a few days.

Enjoy!

So it's been a SUPER BUSY month.

In August alone, I've done more than I can even remember.

I made 9 jars of blackberry jam and 2 jars of blackberry lemon sage.  More fridge pickles (including onions) than I can count - we've been refilling the jars with more veggies!

I made 2 Tomato, Bacon, Feta stratas, mountains of fried eggplant, and a quart of arrabiata.

I made 6 pints of garlic dill pickles.

We started a crock of sauerkraut.

I dried to huge bunches of parsley for in soups later.

We went to GenCon.

I made a scrapbook/autograph book for my nephew.

I made 7 jars of carrot cake jam and 4 pints of bread and butter pickles.

We drove to New Hampshire to see two dear friends get married.

I finally delivered the wine jellies to Dave's sister and brother-in-law.

I made another batch of carrot cake jam.

I made 2 pints of salsa with the salsa mix my sister gave me.

****

Next on the list, Carrot Fennel soup.

After that, September promises pears and apples, and a bonus week of vacation that was only supposed to be 3 days.

And I do intend to share the strata recipe, although, if you're a smart cookie and you know how to make French toast, I bet you can figure it out!

Oh! Gross!

So, I love home canning.  You make have gathered that.  And for tougher/more complicated projects, I won't attempt them without a helper buddy, just in case my kitchen explodes or something.  Which is why I was very pleased to find out when we made Garlic Jelly back in April that Mikey is a pretty good canning buddy.

But, sometimes the canning bug bites and no one's available to help, so I pick an easier project.  Or in this case, the enormous amount of garlic I purchase a while ago, desperately need to be used and everybody had plans already.

I made this really simple Pickled Garlic from Serious Eats a while back, and I really liked it for salad dressing and Dave pretty much ate it straight from the jar.  So, all in all, it was a hit.  And keeping all that in mind, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and pickle at least the bulk of the remaining garlic.

Good news:  It was just as super easy as I remembered and I didn't catch anything on fire or do anything else stupid.
Bad news: I have now had my first, ever, canning jar that didn't seal properly.  In fact, I'm pretty sure it didn't seal at all.  So I only have 5 jars of garlic, instead of 6.
Really Bad news:  Since the jar didn't seal, the garlic was basically fermenting for the last two days, rather than pickling.  You cannot imagine how bad rotten pickled garlic smells, especially after how hot it's been the last few day.  So, nasty!

Canning!

So, we tackled a couple of small home canning projects the other day.  We made 3 half pints of pickled garlic, 2 of which were promised to friends in exchange for sharing the recipes they create with it and we made 8 half pints of Blueberry Lemon Jam.

Highlights:

• It takes way longer than I ever thought possible to peel an entire pound of garlic.
• We ended up with an extra jar's worth of garlic and brine.  I could have processed an extra jar, I guess, but - jackpot!  I don't have to peel any garlic for the tomato sauce I'm making tomorrow.
• I couldn't find my zester, so the lemon peel bits in the jam are a bit big, but it's delicious anyway.
• Even after the jam cooked over, all over the stove, we still ended up with extra!  More than I could fit in the water bath pot, in fact.

The jam I would totally make again, but I wish I knew why my jellies seem to randomly cook over?  I think I may be hurrying them to a boil, but I'm not sure.  So far, I've made 3 batches of jelly.  2 cooked over, one didn't and I don't know what I did different.

The garlic needs to sit, at least until tonight before I can open it to taste.  I may not have the patience for pickles, it's making me crazy waiting.  And I'm dying to see what Liam and Lisa come up with for it.  They're both excellent cooks and the only people I can trust to remember my food allergies without having to interrogate them for their ingredient list.

As for what we're making next?  The list of what I want to make includes pretty much then entire Ball Blue Book, as well as their whole website and a bunch of stuff on Serious Eats.  So, pretty much everything!

Anybody want to narrow it down for me?