I start canning. Again.
Saving the Season is just the book I needed to come up with creative ways to store what I harvest.
My garden is neither small nor large. It would probably be just right for a family of four.
I am a family of one.
While it’s wonderful to be able to pull 75% of the food I consume right out of my own garden, it’s horrible to harvest far more food than I can possibly eat or give away. After all, my friends and neighbors have gardens, too. Although mine was a bit earlier than most, they’re all caught up and trying to give me zucchini, tomatoes, etc. Needless to say, my chickens are feasting on soft tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, and other things these days.
Canning Tomatoes
Last year, I had what I thought was a pretty good crop of roma tomatoes. I set about canning them with my boiling water bath setup, which, because I have a glass-top stove, must be done on the burner beside my BBQ grill out on the deck.
Canning tomatoes is not fun. First you have to boil the jars and lids to sterilize them. Then you have to wash the tomatoes, remove the skins by scalding them in boiling water, dropping them into ice water, and sliding the skins off. Then chop them. Then put them in the prepped jars with a tablespoon of lemon juice to add acid. Then boil them for the required time in the canning setup.
It took me two hours to can two pints of tomatoes last year. I swore I’d never do it again. After all, what does a can of tomatoes cost at the supermarket? Why am I wasting my time canning mine?
Trying Again with Carrots
A few years ago, I’d bought a book at a bookstore up in Winthrop called Saving the Season. It’s all about canning and preserving what comes out of your garden. This year, I finally opened it when I was ready to “save” something I was taking out of my garden: carrots.
Yes, I grew carrots this year for the first time. I cannot believe how well they grew — even in my raised beds, which are only one foot deep! And as one batch was getting big, I planted another batch.
After pulling one or two carrots a week, I finally pulled the rest of the entire first batch. They were huge.
I soon discovered two things:
- Carrots keep getting bigger if you don’t harvest them.
- Freshly harvested carrots lose their stiffness quickly after harvesting. (I won’t tell you what they remind me of after just a few days in the fridge.)
I realized that I’d have to harvest them before the next batch was ready and use them as quickly as I could. Harvesting was easy. Just pull them out from their tops. I had a bunch of really large ones to work with. (Although I only want the orange part, my chickens really seem to love the green tops.) Unfortunately, I just didn’t feel like eating carrots.
The answer was to pickle and can them. The recipe I chose was “Picked Carrots, Taquería Style.” This would produce carrots like those that can sometimes be found at a real Mexican restaurant’s salsa bar. The best part of this recipe: not only would it use up all the carrots I’d picked, but it also called for red onions, jalapeño peppers, and garlic, all of which I also harvested from my garden.
One of my four pint-sized jars of Mexican pickled carrots.
So I put aside memories of peeling tomatoes and got to work following the recipe, dragging my canning setup out of storage in the garage, and prepping the four pint jars I’d need for canning. It went remarkably well, even though I never got the canner up to a full rolling boil. (The recipe said 30 minutes at 180° to 185° was fine.) Although my kitchen looked as if I’d just cooked for a party of 10 when I was done, I had four beautiful jars of pickled carrots that I could store in my pantry until I was ready to eat them.
I also had about a half cup of carrots with some liquid leftover. I put those in a jar in the fridge. This morning, I opened it up for a taste — I knew I wouldn’t like them hot so I didn’t taste them while I was making them. They were delicious.
Now I’m looking forward to that second batch of carrots to be ready to pull. I want to make another four jars to take me through the winter.
And beets….do I have a recipe for those? Let’s see….
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Beautiful job Maria! I used to can with a pressure cooker, think it held 6 pints or quarts but you probably don’t want quarts. My problem was I hated to open those beautiful jars so before the next season it was “hurry up and use”.
I’ve never done pressure canning and so far haven’t needed to. I don’t have the equipment and really don’t want to buy it. I usually can in pint containers. Perfect size for me. There’s a recipe in this book for beets that I’m going to try next.
Two questions. Just cause I’m curious (nosy)?
For the tomatoes – since you’ve given up on canning them – have you considered freezing them?
and
What is it about a glass top stove that sent you outdoors to boil? Too heavy? Not hot enough?
I eat as many as I can and give the rest away. If they get too old for either of those disposal methods, I give them to my chickens. They LOVE tomatoes.
As for the canner pot, it says not to use it on a glass-topped stove. The pot is huge and although I’ve used it on the stove with no real problem, I have to run the burner at full blast for well over an hour just to get the water boiling and finish the canning process. I’m worried about ruining the stove.
I found a pot in my collection that I can use with a silicone steamer basket to keep 4 pint jars off the bottom of the pot. I used that last time and it worked very well. The other pot fits 8 pint jars, but I seldom do that much.
Maria,
Here’s two different ways I do tomatoes depending on what I want as an end product. Either chopped or food processored.
( If that’s a word.) No need for lemon juice.
For the chopped, you do exactly what you did when you canned them. However, instead of putting them in jars and doing the whole hot water bath thing, put them in quart, or gallon, freezer bags and freeze them Done!
The food processor kind are even faster. Wash and core them, cut them into hunks that fit in the food processor and process them a bit. I mean like 5 seconds. Put the processed tomatoes in a qt./gallon freezer bags and into the freezer. Done.
Both methods sound a lot smarter and easier than what I used to go through. But I’d still rather buy canned at the supermarket.
Let’s see. That method would be…Find the tomato section in the store, pick a can off the shelf, put it in your cart. Done. Yep that’s definitely faster and easier. (;o)