Friday, October 21, 2011

Re-Relaunch


My last post was on October 16, 2010. Now we're in October 2011. Whoops. Well, on the plus side, I don't really need to talk about how much I love the Fall. Just scroll down to read about that.

In my last post, I was in the midst of a vegetable-freezing project. So it seems appropriate to re-re-launch the blog with a post about this year's food preservation project. I've taken up canning.

A few months ago my dad gifted me the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, a book I highly recommend to anyone who wants to try their hand at this. Well, in the few months I've had it is already marked up and a little stained, and I've put up 18 quarts of tomatoes, 14 pints of two kinds of mixed veggie pickles, six 8-oz jars of garlic red pepper jelly, six 8-oz jars of red onion jelly, and eight 8-oz jar of peach BBQ sauce.

It turns out that canning really isn't that difficult. It mostly involves waiting for water to boil, which takes an especially long time on our mini-sized stove. Some recipes require a lot of chopping, but that's usually the brunt of the work. I have, however, so far avoided recipes that involve roasting or putting anything in a food processor (would someone like to give me a food processor?).

Okay, so this post isn't very inspired, but I'll get my groove back. In the meantime, here are some canning photos! The light in my apartment is awful, so I'm sorry the photos are so yellow and difficult to look at....

Tomatoless Peach BBQ Sauce

Peeled peaches (dropped in boiling water, then cold water, and the peels slip right off!)


The BBQ sauce, my big canner (the jars are boiling inside), and the lids sterilizing in the small pot. In the background is my canning station (jar holder, jar lifter, magnetic lid lifter).


The final product!

Perhaps I'll do a more in-depth post about canning, but I think I'm done for the season. We'll see--I might not be able to help myself!

1 comment:

Tía Elena said...

I'm looking forward to Christmas . . . Yum!