can do

Hey! Long time, no blog! I certainly didn't mean to ditch out on my little corner of the web, but I have been one busy little pioneer of a beaver.

You see Elwood sent us to St Jacob's market on Thursday with my girl JB and a scavenger hunt for the kiddos because Elwood is smart like that. While the kids were hunting down different types of veggies, pies  and berries, JB and I were price checking these.....



So many tomatoes! And we bought so many tomatoes. A full bushel, which is a shit load of tomatoes for those of you that don't speak farmer. Then we bought a boat load of cucumbers, peaches, peppers and jalapenos. After a quick run to walmart for all the canning jars we could get our hands on I pretty much moved in with JB, her cutie patootie kids and handsome husband and we got to chopping.



I think we chopped for three days straight and when we weren't chopping we were washing, blanching, peeling, sterilizing, cooking, stuffing and water bathing. As it turns out JB and I work very well together in her kitchen. We got a crazy amount of work done, for a ridiculously little amount of money and it never really felt like work.



We "did up" pickles, crushed tomatoes, pickles, three different kinds of salsa, pickles, pickled jalapenos, and did I mention pickles? Jen did a final count at the end and we had 161 jars of the above at a cost of about 80 cents a jar. I see much more canning in our future. I've done canning before, but usually on my own and at a much smaller scale.



I'd have to say, what we lacked in experience we more than made for with enthusiasm. We had no idea how to figure out yields. We bought peaches hoping we'd get 6 cups out of them and I ended up with 18 cups of peaches. Luckily we had enough of all the other ingredients to make a triple batch of  peach salsa and enough jars. We did do a couple of "jar runs" during the course of our canning marathon.

This whole canning adventure started from an of hand comment one of us made to the other and I'm still kind of surprised how easily it all came together. I highly recommend canning with a friend and if you've never canned before, we started with the pickles which were very easy to do and they taste delicious. So if you're looking for a way to dip a toe into the canning game, this is it.

Have you done any canning?