Hurricane Irene Canning Session!

Gail & I ended up picking the perfect weekend for a massive canning session! While Irene inched up the coast and made landfall we were canning like mad. Here is the final haul after a weekends worth of hard work:

Let me just say: that is A LOT of canning for one weekend - 12 quarts, 8 pints, & 30 half pints!!! A mix of tomato sauce, beet relish, corn relish, and garlic pineapple salsa!!

The tomato sauce is chock full of tomato seconds & onions from our friends at Kimball Fruit Farm, as well as tomatoes, peppers, garlic, basil, and oregano from our garden! We have a simple hand-crank tomato mill to juice the 25lb boxes of tomato seconds we pick up from the market. Once we've gathered a few gallons of juice we cook it down and add onions, diced tomato chunks, garlic, and spices to our preference. When we feel the sauce is the right consistency we jar it and process it! We made 12 quarts and 3 pints of sauce this batch to go with the 11 quarts we've previously made.

The Corn Relish recipe is easy and can be found in the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving and the always wonderful Beet Relish recipe is the same one from last summer because there is no sense is messing with a perfect thing!

Finally, the salsa. I had scanned cookbooks and the internet and went over hundreds of Salsa recipes. Not finding one that was just right I decided to make my own, and the results were great! This is a delicious Pineapple Garlic salsa with oven roasted tomatoes.

Garlic Pineapple Salsa

12-15 big tomatoes, diced

3 onions, diced

15 cloves of garlic, finely diced

6 jalapeno's seeded, diced

6-8 hot peppers seeded, diced

3 cups diced pineapple

1/4 cup fresh cilantro

1 tablespoon salt

3/4 teaspoon chili flakes (more if you like it spicier)

3/4 cup cider vinegar

Wash & train tomatoes, Peel, seed, and dice into 1/4 in pieces.

Remove seeds from hot peppers, place in a small bowl. Pour boiling water over hot peppers just to cover, allowing peppers to steep for 10-12 minutes. Drain half the water. Puree hot pepeprs and remaining water in a food processor for 1 minute.

Combine all ingredients in a large sauce pot and bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes or until mixture thickens.

Ladle hot salsa into sterilized jars leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Process for 15 minutes in water bath canner.

Like I said the salsa turned out great!! So great that the picture of all the cans on our table is missing a pint jar of salsa because we managed to eat it all in about a day!

With the canning, herb preservation, frozen breads, and other stuff we are ending up with a nice little stock of home preserved foods. Once schedules here calm down a little bit I will have to conduct a tour and tally of all the stuff we are storing!