It is hard for some to believe but I hadn't ever canned until this week. I love it! I am addicted. First we canned plums that we picked at the home of a friend of a friend. We started with about 40 pounds of plums (Italian prunes) and ended with 21 quarts of plums in syrup. We did it as our Family Home Evening lesson/activity. My 20 month old handed me plums, I rinsed them off, my husband cut them in half, and our 6 year old removed the pits and packed them into the jars. After a while of that I moved on to making the syrup by boiling 5 cups of water with 3 cups of sugar. I filled the jars then when 7 were done we processed them. I only had 14 quart jars so we had to use 14 pint jars too, which made for 4 batches. I had two quart jars burst in the canner but other than that, they all sealed and worked just fine. We think the two burst because the syrup cooled too much so the temperature changed too much when they hit the boiling water. For the rest we placed the jars into hot tap water for a couple minutes to warm up the glass before putting them in the canner. It seemed to work. I followed these instructions.
Then on Wednesday my friend and I went out and picked grapes and tomatoes from another friend who had an abundance. We ended up with about 85 pounds of grapes, which we juiced in an awesome steamer-juicer. We ended up with 24 quarts and about 20 liters of juice. The quart jars seal on their own because the juice comes out of the steamer at about 200 or so degrees so you just put on a clean lid and as it cools it seals. The liter bottles are just old juice and soda bottles that we pop into the freezer. To drink the juice I dilute it to about 50% and add a little sugar (some of the grapes were not fully ripe yet). It is so delicious. I am not a fan of most store-bought grape juices but this is totally different, and oh so delicious.
On Friday, while we were finishing up the grape juice, I tried my hand at canning tomatoes. It was really easy. I blanched the tomatoes to remove the skins (place in boiling water for 30-60 seconds or until the skin splits, then remove and place in cold water for a few seconds) then I quartered the tomatoes (they were roma tomatoes so they weren't too large) and stuffed them into pint jars. Because tomatoes have been bred lately to have less acid, you have to add lemon juice (1 Tbsp per pint, 2 Tbsp per quart) to inhibit the growth of bacteria (Whose idea was it to take out the acid in tomatoes? Just leave the darn things alone.) So, after I added the lemon juice I added boiling water until I had 1/2 inch head space, put on a clean lid, and screwed on the ring. I ran them in hot tap water to avoid bursting then processed them. We got 16 pints of tomatoes (3 were just yellow pear tomatoes, which I did whole because they are so small).
Now I am stuck between being excited to use my home-canned produce in recipes all winter and being afraid I will use them all too quickly, which makes me not want to use them. Does anyone else have that problem?
