Can-stravaganza

Well, it's that time again! Time to fill the larder and get ready for a long winter of soups and stews and the occasional pizza with homemade sauce.

My friend Jen and I invested in 75 pounds of tomatoes and put up 34 quarts for our respective pantries. And Jen couldn't get enough and canned another 9 quarts of dill pickles in the same afternoon. And then I couldn't get enough and picked a peck of wild blackberries--the kind that grow in ever neglected patch of land in the Northwest--and turned them into jam for my Sunday morning amusement.

Super-canners extraordinaire: Laura & Jen.

Another angle to get an idea of the magnitude.

I had to break out the bacon for my first BLT of the season. That tomato beauty is home-grown--weighing in around 2 pounds.

Five pints of blackberry jam. It's extra delicious because it is seedless.

So far this year, I've done peach, plum and blackberry jam, sliced peaches, dill and sweet pickles, sweet relish, dilly beans and tomatoes. I've nearly exhausted my supply of jars...although I think I have enough to make a batch of jelly from the grapes growing all over the foreclosed home next door. And, if I come upon a abundance of something, I might just have to locate some more jars.

Peaches

I serendipitously came across a box of peaches on a return trip for work last Friday. Peaches weren't in the plans for canning this summer, especially the when the plan included leaving town for the weekend. But since it was the season and a box of juicy, ripe peaches can't call my name and not get my attention, I packed up 25 lbs of stone fruit and took them to the cabin with me for a canning extravaganza. It was a little more difficult working in a foreign kitchen without all of my gadgets or sharp knives but I managed. Justin helped by eating seven peaches in 2 days, a feat I didn't think he was up to. In the end there were 5 pints of spiced peach preserves and 8.5 quarts of sectioned peaches in light syrup....and an electric stove that about to cash in on its pension and retire.

Plums

 Isn't it wonderful to have abundant fruit trees everywhere you turn in this city? It's even better when there's a free-for-all pair of plum trees less than a mile away. On Sunday, Justin and I went to pillage the plum trees in preparation for the inaugural annual canning rituals. Someone had beat us to the low-hanging fruit so Justin, brave as he is, pulled himself up a small cliff holding onto ivy vines to get to the higher branches. Then he tossed each plum individually down to me to bag up. Truly a team effort!

Honey-ginger plum jam.

Today, I boiled and peeled and mashed and stirred those plums into a jammy slurry and canned my first* bounty of the season. Seven half-pints ain't too shabby.

*Technically the refrigerator pickle and dilly beans were the first but I forwent the water bath canning and opted for a simpler approach.

In a Jam, not a pickle

With the bounty of free fruit ripening up, I declared that this would be a canning weekend. I've been keeping my eyes open for a screaming deal on roma tomatoes but alas, no deals are to be had...yet. But the deal on blackberries and plums was too good to resist. Justin and I picked about 4 quarts of berries on Thursday and I went back out for another 2 quarts on Saturday and turned the whole lot into several half pints of jam.

Canned and ready to be eaten or given away as gifts! Half of the lot is plain blackberry and the other half is blackberry-cinnamon-cardamom jam.

On Sunday, we headed out for a little walk to my favorite plum tree that doesn't appear to be owned by anyone. The plums are small, about the size of large cherries but they have good flavor and they are plentiful. As, I write this, I'm simmering them down with some ginger root to make a tasty preserve. The canning will have to wait until the work week because the plum stew must cool so I can separate out the pits.

Mmmm....stewed plums.

We scoped out the cucumbers at our local fruit stand and they looked pretty picked over. My own cucumber vines in the garden have a lot of little gherkins but only one vegetable worthy of pickling. So, I'll be waiting until my cukes come in or I find a better selection elsewhere. In the meantime, I'll be searching for some *free* dill weed. There's an abundance of fennel around my neighborhood but I haven't stumbled on dill yet...and you call yourself a weed!

One other fruit I'm hoping to find a free source for is figs. We have a fig tree and it has yielded two ripe figs so far but it only has 5 figs on it total--it's pretty young. I'd like to make a fig jam since it makes a lovely hors d'oeuvre with goat cheese and bread. Let me know if you live on the hill and have more figs that you can handle.

And during all of this picking and simmering and processing, my lovely partner painted and painted and painted some more. He likes to zone out to his tunes with a paint brush in hand. Good thing because I've lost steam on the painting.

One more coat and some touch up and our garage is ready for her debut!

Puttin' Up

Yep, that's right. I'm a canner. As much as I reject gender roles, I can't help but enjoy the traditional homemaker tasks. I like to dust and cook and I'll take folding laundry any day over heavy lifting. So, this weekend when it came to canning 75 pounds of tomatoes, I said "Sign me up!". My friend Jen came over to share the bounty (actually she brought the bounty) and we made sauce and pickled cucumbers for a full shift. My dogs were barking when we wrapped up around 5 with quite a haul. Here's a photo taken before the last set of processed cans came out of the canners:This was our first opportunity to use all five burners on our range simultaneously. When we picked out the stove, we thought that fifth burner might come in handy for just this sort of thing.