Canning

Canning is not exactly a modern hobby. It's so much easier (and cheaper) to buy canned goods at the grocery store. But I find it's tastier (and more impressive) to make my own.

Some things should never be canned - spinach, for example (yuck). Thus far I've stuck with acidic foods. These foods are not friendly to botulism bacteria, and thus don't require a pressure canner. I have neither a pressure canner nor a desire to start my own botox factory, so it's jams and tomato products for me.

Our peach tree is apparently rather low maintenance. We did nothing to help it, but it produced an estimated 250 peaches. We ate some, took some to work, made smoothies and lovely alcoholic blender drinks, baked a peach crisp, and most of the rest went into jam. The dogs quickly learned to eat peaches that had fallen on the ground, and would happily do so each afternoon.

Ground peaches also turned out to be ideal for jam. Chopping them up eliminated the possibility of bugs being inside. If you'll allow me to go off on a tangent for a moment, I once chopped a perfectly normal-looking peach in half (NOT from our tree) to find that instead of a pit in the middle, it had a large, live earwig. That was a seriously icky experience.

Anyway, the chopping went on for a while, but peeling the peaches, according to my recipe, was not necessary. I just had to scrub the excessive fuzz off. Besides the peaches, into the jam went some sugar and some "tea." I used pink rosebuds for the first batch and fresh rosemary for the second batch. 

Then came the cooking - about 4 hours - to boil off most of the liquid and allow the natural pectin in the fruit to thicken the jam. I didn't put the jam through a food mill; I simply mashed the fruit every so often as I stirred the jam.

The photo is from the first batch; the second batch was slightly larger. The final yield was 8 large jars and 4 small jars of jam - and I could have made more. Some peaches, sadly, ended up in the compost bin as we were unable to keep up with them all. The jam makes a great pancake and ice cream topping.

A few weeks later, it was time for tomato sauce. I learned my lesson last year about the difficulties of handling pint jars without the proper equipment, so I went off the the hardware store to get a canner and jar tongs. Because we were eating the tomatoes from our garden as fast as we could grow them, I ended up ordering two cases of organic Early Girl tomatoes from a local farm. The picture shows the top layer of one of the cases. Each layer had about 30 tomatoes with two layers per case... you do the math to figure out how many tomatoes needed to be peeled and chopped. Luckily, Willy helped me with much of this work. 

If you don't know how to peel a tomato, it's fairly simple: put it in boiling water for 10 seconds, make a small slit in the skin, and peel it off with your hands. (Don't forget to remove the tomato from the boiling water before attempting this last step.) The picture shows about 1/5 of the tomatoes that we peeled. We filled two large pots with chopped tomatoes each day of canning. 

After cooking down the tomatoes a bit, I added onions, garlic, some fresh basil and oregano from the herb garden, a generous splash of wine, and other secret ingredients. Tomato sauce has to cook down until it is roughly half of its original volume. Accomplishing that without scorching can take all day.

After the first two days, there were still over 30 tomatoes remaining for processing, and I do in fact have a day job. So, those tomatoes ended up going into cans as "crushed tomatoes," which meant I could eliminate the chopping and cooking down process. Final yield: 10 jars spaghetti sauce, 9 jars crushed tomatoes. I will use the crushed tomatoes in chili, curries, and other creations.

Why bother? There are a few advantages. When you can your own foods, you know exactly what ingredients went into the container and where they came from. It's a great way to continue to eat locally, even when the season for specific foods is over. But if you have to buy the fresh produce, you certainly won't save any money.

Garden Update

I've been remiss in updating my "new" blog. (Can I help it? It's nice outside, and the Malabrigo Junkies are having a contest.)

Our house came with lovely raised garden beds, and it would have been a shame not to at least attempt to grow some fresh vegetables.  I have always had a brown thumb, so my expectations were low. I expected the tomatoes to be a challenge, but figured any idiot can grow zucchini. The strawberries and green beans would probably be somewhere in between.

That just goes to show how little I know about gardening. Summer garden recap:

Our zucchini plant produces lovely flowers, but so far only one miniscule zucchini. We got a few Papaya Pear squashes before the plant got, umm, squashed by a rogue peach tree.

We won't have any strawberries until next year (apparently, I should have known this).

My anaheim pepper plant was dying in its pot after expending tremendous effort to produce two huge peppers. I transplanted it into the garden to see what would happen. I estimate we've gotten 20 huge peppers from it since then.

We didn't really get enough beans from the "bush style" plants. A gopher ate one plant. Weeds strangled two others. We did get one mutant bean.

Tomatoes provided me with some heartbreak during the season. Two plants were damaged by frost, and two others had plenty of flowers, but few tomatoes. Only the cherry tomatoes were producing well. But late in the season, the other varieties came through. Here's my recap by variety.

Taxi (pictured at right):

This is a determinate variety (doesn't grow tall) and could thrive in a wine barrel. It produced plenty of medium sized tomatoes with few seeds - great for cooking. But they were bright red, not yellow. Perhaps our plant was defective.

Sungold:

Excellent orange cherry tomatoes. I stopped counting how many we harvested around 100. They are as sweet as candy. Both cherry tomato plants were also more draught-tolerant than our other plants. This plant is nearly six feet tall and still producing.

Reisentraube (pictured at left): 

Heirloom red cherry tomatoes with an earthy flavor. The name means "giant bunch of grapes" and it is easy to see why. The largest tomato from this plant was nearly two inches in diameter.

Black Brandywine:

I discovered after buying this tomato that this variety is not very consistent. I did get dark colored tomatoes from it, but they were all fairly small ones. It also took a long time for the plant to set fruit, and it drank more water than any other plant in the garden. I might try a regular red Brandywine for next year.

Great White (pictured at right):

This plant was supposed to produce tomatoes that weighed a pound each. The tomatoes are not quite that big, but they are definitely delicious. Problem is, we'll get a grand total of 8 tomatoes from it this year.

 

Dixie Golden Giant:

I can't tell you how these taste, because none are ready yet. This plant seems to be too fragile for this climate. It doesn't like cold (part of the plant died during a late frost), and doesn't like dry heat (wilts like crazy after 24 hours without water). The plant finally set fruit in late September and the tomatoes do show signs of becoming giant. I am hopeful that all of the hard work to pamper this plant might pay off.

Next year: 50% hybrid tomatoes! These heirlooms are delicious, but troublesome.