you say "tomato"

I say, OMG THERE SHE BLOWS! 

Needless to say, I had not tried canning tomatoes before.  I was good, sat down and read what I could find in several of the canning books, located what seemed like a pattern for how to cold pack the goods, and set out to accomplish the canning of about 20lbs of tomatoes.

I decided to go with raw packed whole tomatoes because that would leave me the most options to use them later.  And it looked pathetically simple to make.  Cut the x on the bottom of the tomato and blanch for 1 minute (2 or more at my altitude) before pulling and plunging the tomatoes into an ice water bath.  I quickly had a rhythm of cut, boil, plunge and peel and soon there were enough tomatoes for a jar.  The directions had mentioned pushing the small, whole tomatoes into the jar with your hand but I had located only regular-mouthed jars (the wide-mouthed jars purchased for this specific reason were MIA in the basement) which were too small for my hands, so I pushed them down with a spoon until I had covered them in their own liquid.  (Note possible fail point here.)

"Leave a generous 1/2 inch head space."  (Potential fail point two?)

"Water bath processing for 85 minutes" plus my high- altitude requirement of an additional 15 minutes.  I am just going to blame the whole debacle on altitude and call it done.  (Three strikes?)

And, in the small section I failed to see when I was doing my pre-canning prep:  "Turn off the heat and leave the jars in the canner for 5 minutes to prevent siphoning." 

Siphoning - This bit of evil is when liquid boils out of your jars while processing.  Possible causes are fruit packed too tightly, too little head space, and rapid pressure change.  OH yes, that 5 minutes I was supposed to leave the jars in the canner post-boil!  To be honest, I suspect the damage was already done.  The smell of stewed tomatoes was a bit strong when I pulled the lid off the canner.  But when I lifted out a quart jar of tomatoes out, there was an immediate and ominous hissing sound as tomato juice spurted out around the ring and into the hot water.

Poor, sad, liquid-reduced canned tomatoes

Normally, this would be end game for the tomatoes and I'd have had to remove them from the cans, place them in freezer bags and use them before they were irretrievably lost in the depths of my ice box in white fur coats.  The liquid passing from the jar would compromise the integrity of the seal by depositing food between the seal and the jar.  But wouldn't you know it, those little buggers began to ping pop the canning song within minutes and, in the end, all of them sealed.  That's not to say it was a pretty effort - the tomatoes at the top will likely discolor - but at least my learning experience can still be productive!  I'll use the ugly ones first and pretend it never happened.  A few of them even sealed properly!

better packing on this jar?

Roasted!

I still had tomatoes leftover, that's always the way, isn't it?  So I quartered, oiled, salt and peppered, and tucked a handful of basil from my garden under the mix and roasted them until they started to blacken.  Yup, I really want them that way.  It makes them sweeter, caramelizing the natural sugars.  A quick trip through the mouli - I still don't like doing that so it wasn't just my teenage self - and I had an amazing marinara sauce.  Or pizza sauce.  Or something to ladle over baked chicken.  Wow.  This will have to be repeated and frozen!

with relish!

Hot dogs get a bad rap as being filled with leftovers and rejected parts of a multitude of animals but there are some good ones out there - Nathan's and Hebrew National spring to mind as easily-acquired brand names, and any butcher worth their salt will stock a tasty local-style dog.   But as a friend once said to me, the main function of a hot dog is as a vehicle for condiments.

With that in mind, I made Cucumber Relish.  I have plans for ketchup and mustards at a later date!  Fortunately, I read the entire recipe ahead of time, not always something I do but I am getting better, because not only was there a 3-4 hour soak time but there was also a 12-18 hour overnight soak!  There is also an overwhelming amount of dicing and chopping that I was able to make short work of with my cute little Manual Food Processor.

from this...

to this...in only a matter of strokes!

A bit of mixing to show off the colors of the red and green peppers, red onions, and pickling cucumbers used, and voila...

from the old Ball Blue Book of Canning

Speaking of colors, turmeric stains everything.  Oh my word, does anyone have any useful ways to take it off my rubber spatulas (scrapers for those of you in other parts of the country)?  I had to use stainless cleaner to get it out of my giant stainless steel bowl and eventually, it will stop making me look like I have nicotine-stained fingernails!

Aside from inadvertent dying of everything it came into contact with, the relish canned up easily, no major missteps, which is more than I can say about my first venture with tomatoes.  But that is for another post!

You can vary the taste by changing up the type of vinegar (white or apple cider) and sugar (white granulated or brown) and onions (white, yellow, red...).

From Ball Blue Book

2 quarts chopped cucumbers (about 8 medium)
2 cups chopped sweet green peppers (4 small)
2 cups chopped sweet red peppers (4 small)
1 cup chopped onion (1 medium)
1 tbsp turmeric
1/2 cup salt
2 quarts cold water
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 quart vinegar
2 sticks cinnamon
1 tbsp whole mustard seed
2 tsp whole allspice
2 tsp whole cloves

Combine vegetables in a large bowl; sprinkle with turmeric.  Dissolve salt in 2 quarts cold water and pour over vegetables; let stand 3 to 4 hours.  Drain; cover vegetables with cold water and let stand 1 hour.  Drain thoroughly.  Combine sugar  and vinegar in a large saucepot.  Tie spices in a spice bag; add to sugar mixture.

Bring to a boil; pour over vegetables.  Cover; let stand 12 to 18 hours in a cool place.  Bring vegetables to a boil;  reduce heat and simmer until hot.  Pack hot relish into hot jars, leaving 1/4 inch headspace.  Adjust two-piece caps.  process 10 minutes in a boiling-water canner

Yield:  about 6 pints

a pretty pickle

sliced thin, salted and about to be iced

At long last, I brave the true Bread and Butter Pickles (with onions!) from scratch, no cheater packet of spices.  Before breakfast, I sliced all 4lbs of them, with 2 lbs of red onions, and hit 'em up with salt and ice.  And there they sat, shedding excess water so they could make me up a crunchy little pickle.

rinsed and drained

add pickles to stuff I already boiled

It was a sticky but satisfying experience and I am the happy holder of 5 pints and 2 half pints of pickles.  And I still forgot to do the "let the air out" trick...one of these days, I'll remember that. At least these pickles are not floating!

Traditional Bread and Butter Pickles
The Ball Complete Book of Home Preservation

The branzini fish from the other night cooked up fabulously on the grill with some red onions and sliced lemon inside, salt and pepper and olive oil on the outside.  Nothing like the afternoon high Colorado winds to act as bellows for your charcoal grill.  The kids were not as impressed but that was ok as the fish itself did not yield as much filet as I'd have initially thought after my trout experiences.  The taste was somewhere between trout and mackerel, both of which are pictured below, losing their skin in my little Aussie grill.  All in all, I'd have it again.  The fact that the internet touts it as a "green fish" is just a bonus.  Thankfully, my fishmonger scales them all for me.

time in a bottle

With my friend's plane delayed due to weather everywhere in the country but where she was, I pulled out my newly purchased little cabbage and thin sliced it all to death, tossed it in a bowl with some kosher salt, and began squeezin'.  Before she even texted her plane was on the ground, I had it all souped up and stuck in a quart jar to ferment on my counter.  Behold! The Kraut!

Small-Batch Fresh Sauerkraut
Canning for a New Generation by Lianna Krissoff

The next day, there was much movie watching (Potter!) and frozen yogurt eating (Lulu's!) and such but at the end of the day, there were pretty things in jars once again.

Zesty Red Onion Jelly and Sparkling Hot Pepper Jelly

The leftovers that did not make the jar have not lasted long in the refrigerator either.  The pictures do not do these beautiful preserves justice!

My husband and children love hot pepper jelly on crackers, toast, spoons, fingers...so making that was a no-brainer.  I snagged the recipe from Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard's Small-Batch Preserving.  There are other recipes I want to try but when you fail to pick up the proper quantity of liquid pectin, you make what you can!  Zesty Red Onion Jelly, in this iteration, came from the trusty and reliable Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.

can it

Canning!  There is something magical about opening up the cabinet and finding last spring's strawberries in a jar, waiting to join up with a bit of peanut butter on fresh bread.  It brings back not only the season, but in my case, my childhood.  My family has always preserved the harvest and I have fond memories of my grandmother's garden with the strangely colored and shaped tomatoes.  Of course, I have less fond memories from my teenage years of standing in a warm kitchen, working the food moule to get the seeds out of stewed tomatoes prior to freezing, but I blame that on being a teenager more than the activity itself.

Harvest has begun here in Colorado and I have made several fun trips to the farmer's markets, making friends with the various vendors.  I am furiously scouring canning cookbooks from my collection and from the stack of library books I have acquired over the last week.

First up, unexpectedly, were figs.  Decidedly not a farmers market, or even a purveyor of local foods, Costco had a flat of the loveliest looking fresh figs.  In my quest to educate the palates of my sons (8 and 10), I snagged them without hesitation.  Tasty, exotic, and good for you, I could overlook their far flung origin.  The boys liked them, but not enough to consume the lot before they deteriorated!

Fig Preserves in under 3 hours

Alas, I was so disorganized with my canning supplies - we've moved since I last canned (20+lbs of sour cherries, much more than that of peaches) - that I could not find lids so the fig preserves had to go to the refrigerator.  They are delicious and pathetically easy.  Of course, I cannot find the exact recipe online but I have it jotted down, er, somewhere.  Until then, know that it involved cutting the washed figs in half, tossing with some sugar (ok, a lot of sugar) in a stockpot, and cooking down for a couple hours.  In the last 30 minutes, you add sliced lemons that, believe me, you do not want to pull out later.  The candied tart taste of the thin lemon slices adds additional class to an already decadent breakfast treat.

Then came the farmer's market with the boys, they had yummy tamales and tasted local honey, where I picked up some beets on a whim.  Things One and Two do love beets, I'm not so fond of giving them to Thing Two because, let's face it, he is Pig-Pen when he eats and I have yet to find a laundry solution to beet juice.  To prolong the inevitable...

And finally, I have tried my hand at pickles.  I've made many a jam, but clearly, pickles are going to require a packing talent I do not have as yet!  Look at that space at the bottom!  *hangs head*

As I survey my counter full of veg and my very messy house, I wonder what my house guest tonight would prefer...a clean bathroom or some Red Onion Jam?