Wednesday, August 14, 2013

And a Canning Update

According to my notebook, I have bought a bushel of tomatoes almost exactly mid-August for the past several years.  I might as well get used to that in combination with reunions, school preparation, and beach trips.  Today I was getting all tense and high-strung as I tried to figure out my schedule puzzle, and I just kept thinking of how I view canning tomatoes in the depths of winter, how lovely it seems then, and you know what, it worked; I found my nice calm center and Genevieve and I even had a happy cooking lesson and I had a nap.



A bit ago (a week? I don't know - August is a blur), Rebecca gave me a sack of zucchini. I made sweet zucchini relish, an indispensible condiment for tuna salad, 1000 island dressing, tartar sauce, and the like.



 I also canned a peck of peaches, whose beauty is shown in this photo as they ripened. Alas, I allowed them to ripen too long for easy canning, and I must remember next year to can them while they're still a bit firm. But they smelled so delectable!



I have three-quarters of a bushel of tomatoes down in my kitchen.  I made a batch of pizza/spaghetti sauce today and trotted my new pressure canner out for her first go.  She worked beautifully.  The rest of the bushel is for salsa and whole canned tomatoes.  And then I'm going to get an additional half-bushel of tomatoes and I'll tell you all about that when I do two new canning projects.

6 comments:

Dianna said...

Beautiful relish! Is it similar in taste and texture to relish made with cucumbers?

Margo said...

Dianna, thank you, and yes, almost identical to cucumber relish. I am finding that cucumbers and zucchini pickle much the same way; I used zucchini because that was free and available.

Sew Blessed Maw [Judy] said...

Looks great.. I too made squash relish [ I used a mixture of different kinds of squash.. So yummy.. I have made a second batch, since we have so many squash coming in.. Look forward to hearing about your new recipes.

jenny_o said...

Oh, my goodness, that looks delicious.

Jo said...

Oh my goodness, pecks and bushels. I have no idea what these mean, as we do everything in kilograms here in Australia, but it sounds very agricultural, and like you know exactly what you are doing there. Wouldn't it be so much better if we could all do canning in winter?
Do you have a go-to pasta sauce recipe, or can tomatoes plain?

Margo said...

Jo, I tried to look it up online, but it's very confusing! So I'll tell you that a peck of peaches yields about 5-6 quart canning jars - but maybe you don't talk about quarts in canning jars, either! A bushel of tomatoes is a lot and here's a photo: http://thriftathome.blogspot.com/2011/08/what-i-got-from-bushel-of-tomatoes.html

With a bushel of tomatoes, I make a batch of pizza sauce (10-12 pints), a batch of salsa (10-12 pints), and the rest as whole tomaotes (16-19 quarts). I hope that answers your question clearly enough!