Busy Canning Day

Over the past 24 hours I've canned 30 things. Pictured here is today's efforts: salsa, chutney, hot sauce, and pickles. More about all of this once I get a rest.

Chopping, chopping, chopping

This morning I went to the Asian supermarket so I could get supplies for making salsa. Produce is always best and cheapest there. I still have many tomatoes and I'm making colorful salsa from yellow and orange bell peppers and green hot peppers so it is all pretty. I intend to use this as Christmas gifts.

Meanwhile, my fingers hurt and they are even wrinkled from chopping all of the fresh vegetables. I also got some apricots with the intent of making jam, but I'm, not happy with them so I'm going to see how they do in chutney.

I also got a ton of pickling cucumbers for 99 cents a pound. My favorite farm stand hasn't been having them and so I was afraid of not having enough pickles all winter.

Tomato sauce and chutney

Right now my kitchen stove is splattered with everything you can think of and my kitchen has been continuously a mess.I've done a lot of caning in the past week. Today I'm working on tomato sauce and chutney from all of those tomatoes I chopped yesterday.

The sauce (top pot in photo) is just a vegetarian spaghetti sauce, which will get frozen in meal sized portions. The bottom pot is tomato chutney. I made a very successful peach chutney over the weekend and I thought I'd try it with tomatoes. Well, it isn't done yet, but so far, so good. Both of these look a little watery in this photo but that was soon remedied by plenty of cooking down.

Peaches and tomatos

Well, another weekend, another 1/2 bushel of tomatoes. I also have peaches. Needless to say, I spent a good many hours blanching, peeling, slicing and chopping.

Fresh Peaches

It seems that everyone in the world has fresh peaches this week. I got a ton and I spent the day making peach jam, spiced peaches, and simply cutting them up and preparing them for the freezer.

The spiced peaches came out delicious, but I'm not happy enough with the packing to give them as gifts. I used the spiced peaches recipe from pickyourown.org. I ended up with a ton of leftover syrup, but I'm not sure what I want to do with it since I'm not going to use it for spiced peaches.

Russian Black Bread

This morning I went with my Dad to the Russian food stores near here. I got an assortment of Russian candies (which I didn't eat yet because they are so pretty) and some of this black bread. He said his parents only ate butter on it. I found that this was just right. Later, I did put some of my tomato jam on it, which I made the other day. That was good. I also added a few slices of Jarlsburg cheese on the side.

Tomato Jam

I've had a craving to make tomato jam for about a month ago. It all started when I read a blog entry by the Amateur Gourmet where he casually mentioned eating tomato jam on a sandwich. I wondered what this would taste like-- I envisioned some sort of savory tomato spread. I began researching this and today I decided to try this recipe from Food in Jars.

I have to say, it is not bad, but then it is not so good that I want to eat it all. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the 5 or 6 jars I ended up with, except palm some off to adventurous eaters. It is terribly sweet and tastes more like a sweet and spicy ketchup. I just labeled it "ketchup" and stuck it on my shelf until I can figure out what to do with it.

Tomatoes!!

Over the weekend picked up a 1/2 a bushel of #2 grade tomatoes from a local farm stand. There was nothing wrong with them except that they were cracked from growing too quickly. I decided that they should all go into the freezer for soup and chili. I spent a good part of the day peeling, dicing and packing them into freezer bags in recipe sized quantities. I'm happy because these have no salt, unlike canned tomatoes.

Church garden harvest

I volunteer with a garden at my church and this is what I picked this morning. The harvest goes to our food pantry.