Homesteading

This past weekend, Leslie and I did some home canning.  We didn't do as much as a lot of folks but getting started has been the challenge.  Saturday July28th was spent canning pickles.  Some of the cucumbers were given to us and some were taken from our garden.  We cut them into spears and packed them into jars along with garlic and one hot banana pepper per jar.  These were processed in a hot water bath and left to cool.  Ten quarts of pickles will last us a while.  All of this was done after we made 3 gallons of refrigerator pickles that get eaten up VERY quickly.  I think we haven't canned pickles in the last few years because the refrigerator pickle are so easy to make and go well with summer foods.

Sunday we went to the garden for tomatoes and hot banana peppers.  There weren't as many tomatoes as we thought so you just deal with what you have.  Leslie is using these to make spaghetti sauce.  Water was heated, and the tomatoes went into the hot tub until their wrinkly little skins came right off.  From there they were pureed a bit and put into a crock pot to reduce down to less than half the quantity.  That took over a day to do.

 

After the tomatoes were blanched, I got things ready to put up my hot banana peppers.  Water, jars, lids, clean this, make that, and the vinegar solution were all dealt with before filling the jars and putting them in the water bath.  This recipe says the peppers will stay crisp as along as they are only in the boiling water for 5 minutes.  Luck was with me and hopefully the stars were aligned properly.  Everything seemed to go very smoothly.  I got 13 pints and one quart of peppers.  Five of the pints were cut into slices, the rest were left whole in the jars.

Our next attempt is going to be canning venison.  The freezers don't ever seem to have any room for anything.  So a few packs of steaks will be thawed, cut up, browned and packed into wide mouth pint canning jars.  The difference with meat and other low acid foods is that it must be processed in a pressure canner.  More about that when we get to it.