Well, I’ve been too busy to post!
I have canned salsa for 3 nights, pickles for 3 nights, fruit jam for 3 nights, ketchup for 1 night, sauerkraut for 1 night (plus 1 night to put it in the crock and nightly checks for 10 days), tomatoes for 1 night (so far), pizza sauce for 1 night, and . . .
We have been camping with good friends (completely sans rectangles, so no pictures), tending the garden and practicing for this weekend’s upcoming Amateur Chef competition!
I do have a few pictures of this and that, taken over the course of the last month. They’ll be posted eventually, but for now . . .
There is a bushel of peaches in my kitchen and I still haven’t saved seeds from any of my tomatoes. 
My lovely wife mashing strawberries
We got the last 5 quarts of strawberries at a local farm and canned up some lovely sweet treats for the next year (or two, just don’t tell the authorities).
Strawberry Jam. 6 half-pints and 4 mini-jars.
Strawberry Syrup. 8 four-ounce jars plus leftover.
Yum, yum, yum!
It should go without saying, but in case you’re new here… These canned goods were made from fine, sweet, local (less than 5 miles away), organic strawberries. The jam was made with berries, sugar and store-bought pectin.
I would have liked to keep corn out of the strawberry syrup, but the recipe called for both white sugar and corn syrup. We were in a midnight rush (literally) to use the berries before they spoiled, so we didn’t have time to find a different recipe or suitable substitution. I did have to watch out which BRAND of corn syrup I bought, as the cheaper store brands contained HFCS and a well known name brand did not.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention… I also canned Rhubarb-Strawberry Jam a few weeks ago. That tastes awesome too!
Cast iron triple burner
Last summer I learned to can my garden produce in glass jars. This involves boiling big pots of food and water for as long as a couple hours at a time, usually on the hottest evenings of July and August. The resulting humidity in the house was very uncomfortable, so we would run the air conditioning all night. That made canning very energy expensive in a way we didn’t anticipate.
This summer I’ll be doing much of my canning on this old bar surface. This is set up in my attached garage immediately next to the 2-car garage door opening. It’s also just a few steps from my actual kitchen.
The bar has been reused many times. We inherited it with the house we bought 10 years ago and it held laundry for about 5 years. It held an aquarium for about 3 years after that and when it was moving day we almost left it behind for the next buyer. Instead, my wife talked me into taking it apart and cutting it down to it’s current short height. She used it this way in her elementary classroom for a year or two before bringing it home again. Now it has been repurposed again as a kitchen counter!
Canning here won’t be quite as convenient as inside the house, but it should work fine! It will also be interesting to be able to measure EXACTLY how much we have to spend on the energy for canning (at $19 per tank refill).
It’s hard to see, but there are 11 trays of glass canning jars here!
A view from one side
And a view from the other
We scored about 200 canning jars last night. A friend of my wife’s is cleaning out his mother’s house after her passing and he wants this stuff gone. We were happy to oblige. This might be all we will need to can the vegetables and fruit we’re going to eat for the next year.
The dishwasher has been running non-stop and now they are finally all clean. It doesn’t help anything that I have walking pneumonia and zero energy.
I also got two old (untested) pressure cookers, a rusty (salvageable) food mill and an old beat up collander with a handle. They even threw in about 3 dozen of each type of canning lid.
The price was right…they didn’t ask for anything. I ended up paying him about $50.
It sure is a lot of quarts. It’s over half quart jars, the rest are pints. I prefer pints. Want to trade?
It sure was fun to see all these different jars. Based on the newspaper packing material in the boxes, these were put away around 1985. There were lots of 1976 US bicentennial celebratory jars, and a set of “harvest time” jars that have an interesting design. There are some tall jars that will be good for uncut asparagus, a handful of jars bigger than quarts, and a whole box that aren’t canning jars at all. Oh well!
There were a dozen or so that I passed on and did NOT take home. These still had food in them. :O Yep! One jar still had recognizable red tomatoes or sauce. The others had unsealed over the years and dried down to a little tomato cake that has since turned into something like ash or dirt.
Now let me tell you the worst part! I told my wife that asking around for jars wouldn’t work. I said, “Too many people are going to be canning this year. Jars will be hard to find even at the store this summer. It won’t help to ask around.” Then she finds me this haul. Thank you hon!!
I have had this blog for almost a year now. The graphic below shows a screen shot of the search engine phrases that have brought visitors to my site, along with the frequency of their use:
Well…I know what I need to write more about this year. Expect a July or August series on putting up every tomato product known to man. 
Or at least one nice informative post.
4 gallon crock
I have a crock now! I mentioned to my parents that fermenting/pickling crocks like these are now sold for nearly $100 and that price was keeping me from trying homemade sauerkraut. They remembered this old crock that had been in their garage the whole time I was growing up and said I could have it.
Awesome! Thanks Mom and Dad!
Now how do I clean up 30 years of dust and make this food-worthy again? Water and bleach, bleach and water?
Did you know that grocery store green onions will grow back the part you ate? Neither did I until about a week ago!
In the picture below you see the white part at the bottom of a set of grocery store green onions. I cooked a delicious recipe for Christmas dinner and ate the tops. I planted the roots in a pot under my grow lights.
I replanted the unused ends of my green onions.
After only 4 days, the greens were already growing back (below).
After 4 days
The picture is a bit blurry, but you get the idea. Already the tops were growing back about a centimeter on most of the onion root ends.
After 11 days
After 13 days
After 20 days (they were inside this week due to extreme cold)
Update: late February…
I harvested the greens again after 6 or 8 weeks. The bottom white part of the onion had grown weary. It was thin and lifeless and I knew they wouldn’t grow much for me if I tried them again. Some were barely hanging onto the soil and most hadn’t grown any new root length that wasn’t there already . I’m not sure if it was a need for fertilizer or a need for better lighting, or if this is just a trick that works once per set of onions. I chopped and dried mine and put them in a glass jar to use later in soup.
I’ll revisit and update this post from time to time.
Canning:
- Salsa (garden tomatoes with Mrs. Wages spice packets) [10 pints, 20 half-pints]
- Tomato sauce (garden tomatoes)
- Tomato paste (maybe, if I have the patience. I can buy this for like 19 cents though.)
- Whole tomatoes, possibly
- Sweet pickles (garden cucumbers with Mrs. Wages spice packets, crinkle-cut slices and diagonal sandwich slices) [10 pints, 10 half-pints]
- Dill pickles (5 quarts spears and 2 pints of hamburger slices)
- Sweet relish
- Applesauce (apples bought locally, 1 to 1.5 bushels)
- Pepperoncinis (water, vinegar, sweet, salt brine???)
- Jalapenos, if semi-mild (again, what liquid?)
- Sweet & Sour Sauce (thin bell pepper jelly)
Freezing:
- Broccoli
- Green Beans
- Bell Peppers
With a few green jalapeños and one habañero from the pepper plants I pulled before frost, I made up some of “Jessica’s Hot Pepper Sauce.”
I normally do not like the site About.com, but I do enjoy the sauce that I made using this recipe:
Ingredients:
- 1 1/2 cups vinegar
- 6 chile peppers (at least one cayenne, a variety tastes best) minced
- 6 oz can tomato paste
- 1 tablespoon minced garlic
- 1 teaspoon black pepper
- 1 teaspoon lemon juice
- Olive oil
Preparation:
- Saute your peppers and garlic in about a tablespoon of olive oil.
- Stir in the tomato paste and half the vinegar.
- Bring to boil and add the rest.
This turned out a bit thick and the recipe completely forgot to add salt. I actually unbottled this after my first tasting and added at least a teaspoon full of salt to the recipe, if not twice that.
I have been keeping it out at room temperature because it won’t run through the neck of the bottle I chose for it when it’s cold. It’s pretty acidic, so we’ll see how long it lasts. Maybe I ought to just pour it into a jar and refrigerate it.
Don’t let me fool you with those last few negative observations…I really like this hot sauce! I will save the modified salt-added recipe and make this again. I might try to modify it further to remove the oil so I can safely can it in quarter-pint jelly jars and perhaps increase the liquid by a couple tablespoons.
The next-to-the-last thing out of my garden for 2008 were the pepper plants. Only the lettuce remains now.
I had quite a handful of chili peppers that didn’t turn red, so I thought I would try making some spicy vinegar like I have seen out on the tables at some restaurants.
I did no research until after the fact, so there are things I would do differently now. I just washed and dropped all the peppers I had into an old clean soy sauce bottle. Then I threw in about a teaspoon of salt and filled it with hot vinegar.
It seems to have worked out fine, as just an hour or two after filling the bottle the vinegar was already spicy.
According to most sources I checked later, I should have completely filled the bottle with vegetables to avoid the peppers floating in there. I would have done that if I’d had enough peppers, but I guess I could have also used fillers like onions and carrots.
Anyway, it has a great taste already and I can hardly wait to see how it is after a few weeks.
