Canning along
I canned two and a half more quarts of foraged pears last night – I’ve gone through more than half of them now.
I also made 6 pints of startlingly delicious barbecue sauce. (Not your typical “barbecue sauce” flavor, but zingy – with 1/4 a habañero, it ought to be – salty, sweet, and well-spiced. The 16 cups of tomato puree that went in were mostly mine, but I traded a dozen eggs to a friend in exchange for 2 pounds of gorgeous peppers and used a whole bunch of bells and cascabels from that bounty to round it out. So it’s not totally “home-grown”, but still fairly self-sufficient I’d say.
My shelves in the basement are certainly filling up. This picture below doesn’t even include the 29 pounds of butternut squash that’s upstairs in a closet, the potatoes, 5 quarts frozen sweet corn, 2 gallons basil cubes, or the dozen pints of strawberry jam from earlier in the year. And the sweet potato crop has yet to come in, too. So it’s better than it looks.
Left to right, top to bottom:
- Gingered peach marmalade, 1pt honeyed peach syrup, peach marsala jelly, peach-blackberry cobbler filling, sweet pickle relish, brown-sugar green-tomato relish, barbecue sauce, pickled beets, pico de gallo, three-bean salad.
- Tomato juice, quarts of crushed tomatoes, ketchup, lots and lots of roast-tomato sauce.
- Watermelons, you know what those bottles are, tomato jam, honeyed peaches, brown-sugar peaches, peaches in their own juice.
- Pears in cognac syrup, pears with cognac and almond, lacto-fermented pickles, roast red peppers, cured olives.
While we’d need 10 times this amount to even think about a self-sufficient winter, I’m still pleased with my efforts. (Josh says that my measure of success is too high at “Would we die?” but I think it’s a pretty clear-cut goal. -laugh-)
And I’ve run out of jars! I have a couple quarts left and maybe 5 scattered random pints. I can’t believe I’ve used them all! Anyone want to share? 😀
October 8th, 2010 at 9:20 am
I’ll have to check my stash, I’ll still need some for apples when my fav’s ripen at the farm:) If you find any place with cheap seconds (apples) let me know! I would love to can pumpkin as we use so much but my crop died and I really don’t have then time to process it all:(
October 9th, 2010 at 1:08 am
like mother like daughter…I too ran out of jars and need to buy more, many more. The freezer is full with frozen grapes to wait till I can make juice for jelly, syrup. The apples are overflowing the bushel basket and still coming down off the tree. There is no more room in the freezer: apples, grapes, berries,nectarines, oh my! Not even room for chicken,steaks or ground beef…is that pitiful or what?Maybe we will have to be fuitarians (vergetarians with only a fruit diet?) until I can can or eat up some of our nature’s bounty…
HELP!!! and my back porch cabinet has a half shelf full of assorted jams just from this year and we are not done preserving yet…not if I want my kitchen back.