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.
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