Do You Can-Can?
Troupe de Mlle. Eglantine, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Sketchbook, Faber-Castell Ink Pens
Do you can-can? I can can. What I mean to say is I can can. Or, at least I thought I could. Boy, one batch of strawberry jam and baby girl thinks she’s a pro. Ha!
There’s more to home canning than I ever knew. This is what 2 bunches of celery, 6 green peppers, 2 red peppers, 10 onions, and 30 tomatoes looks like when they’re chopped up for the soup pot. The tomatoes hadn’t been seeded yet.
Chili Sauce: Before
My recipe said to put it all in a large pot. I have a large pot. Isn’t it pretty? It should have said very large pot! You should have seen the expression on my face when I started adding ingredients. First, the tomatoes, followed by the celery, and one container of peppers. At that point, the pot was full, and I still had a container of onions and another of peppers to get in there.
I used two pots, and added the contents of the smaller “large pot” into the soup kettle as the veggies cooked down. Over the 4 hour simmer time, I managed to get it all in one pot. Then I got to the end of the recipe… begin canning. Great, I can do that! Unfortunately, the required head space and processing time were no where to be found.
I went to the Fresh Preserving website, and then to the National Center for Home Food Preparation website, and decided I had a high acid, pickled product. The only recipe I found that came close to mine required 15 minutes of processing time. I decided 20 minutes should be a safe. Hope I don’t kill anybody…
Chili Sauce: After
The recipe stated I’d get about 13 pints of sauce. I got 8 and a partial jar full. That was a lot of work for such a small reward. Two days of peeling, chopping, coring and seeding followed by 4 hours of cooking time. An then, six of the eight jars had to be re-processed because they didn’t seal properly! I have not been a happy camper this week.
I had hoped to have the alphabet finished before the end-of-summer crunch. Obviously, I didn’t make it. We go to the peach farm this week for- peaches! And yes, I’ll be canning those too. Hubby eats ‘em every day for lunch, and anything we don’t have to spend at the grocery store is something we can put in the gas tank. I’m making peach jam, too, which will be a welcome relief from all those blackberries!
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That’s a whole lotta veggies!
Isn’t it funny how recipies never yield the amount they’re supposed to? :\
This is my grandmother’s recipe, and I have to wonder about size of the tomatoes back then. We used to grow HUGE tomatoes when I was a kid, and I don’t see anything like that anymore.
I also wonder about the “large pot” and what was used in the early 1900’s. I think pots, pans, and stoves were probably larger back then, too!
Progress. It’s a rip-off.