Canning Adventures

So we took the plunge and started canning our own food today.  Spent some time yesterday snapping 6 bags of green beans that we got from our co-op.  Tomatoes have started slowly ripening so we have been picking and saving them for several days now.  We got about 8 qt and another 10 pints of green beans and about 7 or 8 pints of home-made salsa.  Seems like not much for an 8 hours day of work but it's a start!  We will be more efficient now that we know a little more what to do.

We learned that canning takes longer than you would think and having 2 canners will speed things up once we get the gasket and valve replaced on mine (also part of the adventure...why is this thing leaking!?) we can use that along side the one we borrowed from my mom.  When something says you need to process it for 30 mins its really 60-90 mins with the heating up, venting, processing time and cooling down.  It was also a blessing to have an extra table to set up in the middle of our kitchen floor to hold all the jars we were filling and getting ready. I can't imagine doing this without a dishwasher either, it made the cleaning of the jars so much easier.  Next time however we will do the jars before we go to bed as we spent over an hour waiting on the dishwasher to finish so we could start and it put us behind for the day.

When we get a big batch of tomatoes we will can those diced and whole for cooking and soups.  We are also going to make some homemade spaghetti sauce with meat and some kind of soup.  The salsa sounded so good and the cilantro is coming in fast and the tomatoes were a bit sparse so we figured while we have only a small amount of tomatoes we will just salsa it.

I am going to try and do some canning weekly and experiment to see what we find we like and what tastes good once we crack it open and try it.  We will also be getting a beef quarter byt the end of this month so some meat canning is also planned.  We actually have enough stew meat now to make some meat soups and maybe some canned stew meat.  

Its been fun and I think we will enjoy the food this winter as well as feel more prepared with our food stores.