22 August 2011

It was a Canning Day here yesterday, as I finally amassed all the right ingredients in one place. Picked a bunch of Straight Eight cucumbers mostly from the garden of a close-by relative on Saturday evening and set to work Sunday morning. I'm pretty sure I've gone over the strawberry-rhubarb jam processing here before, as well as dill pickles. It started out with a literal bang while sterilizing the jars, as one of an older pair that I inherited did a clean break at the bottom, apparently from the heat. And then in the first jam session, I heard another sound from the canner and lifted the lid to see red water and loose bits of rhubarb in the roiling water. Not cool. Not cool at all. But, in total, I successfully processed 12.5 pints of jam. And then with the pickling (after changing the water, of course) I got 16 quarts done in three batches. The cukes were literally so large and seedy that for most of them, I sliced them in half lengthwise, and scooped out all the seeds before cutting them into wedges. Oh well, I never liked the seeds and mushy interior part anyway! (When we bought them at the store, I'd always get the little gerkin dill types that weren't big enough to have seeds.) I also did a few quarts of the "sandwich stacker" cut with some of the smaller cukes from my own garden, which worked out very well last year. I may do a small batch of relish in some of the left over pint jars if and when our cucumbers start to take off.

I just like the self-sufficiency aspect of canning. Not to mention that today's processing is equivalent to ~$100 (give or take) if we had to buy these things in the store through the year.