Canning Day

"It's canning day! It's canning day!"  That's what I excitedly said when I woke up Saturday morning.  I knew it was going to be work, but I was excited nonetheless.  Tom and the cats thought I was crazy.

We started by sterilizing the jars.  I love that we can use the dishwasher for this.  Not only does it clean the jars, it keeps them hot so they don't have to be in a pot of water on the stove waiting to be filled.  That frees up a burner on the stove for another use.  Plus, it keeps the jars all tucked away until we're ready for them.

We harvested all the mariachi peppers left on the plants, except for a few small ones, and any tomatoes that were ready to go.

We decided to make peach jam to give as gifts so we bought 23 pounds of peaches from the Kings Drive Farmer's Market. We woke up bright and early Friday morning and headed to the market to buy fresh South Carolina peaches.  We also bought NC trout, NC blackberries, corn on the cob and onions.  All for $25!  The tomatoes and peppers shown here are from TYs garden of course.

Then the preparation began.  Tom de-seeded and de-veined the peppers.  He made sure to wear gloves so his hands wouldn't absorb all that heat.

Meanwhile, I cleaned all the peaches and dunked them in boiling water....

then in ice water to make the skins easier to peel.

Once the skins were removed we diced them up and added lemon juice, pectin and sugar to make the peach jam.  We made three batches in all.

We took the clean, hot jars out of the dishwasher one by one and filled them up.

After a quick 10 minute water bath, the jam was done and lookin' purty.  We used 10.5 pounds of peaches to make 12, 12oz jelly jars and 4 pint jars worth of peach jam.  With the left over peaches I also made two peach/blackberry crisps and of course we ate a peach or two here and there.

After roasting the peppers we put them in jars and set them in the pressure cooker for 25 minutes or so.  (The photographer got a bit wrapped up in what was going on and didn't do as good a job taking pictures of ALL the steps so you'll just have to imagine roasted peppers coming out of the oven and into jars.)

Sunday was tomato day.  We started by giving the tomatoes a quick dunk in boiling water until the skins cracked....

then a dunk into ice water to stop the cooking process.

The two steps above sure made it easy to take the skins off all these tomatoes!

After taking the skins off, we cut the tomatoes into big chunks.

Canned them up and put them in the pressure canner.

Once the pressure hit 11 pounds we started the timer and waited for the prescribed amount of time.

This is the bounty that we created this weekend!  We ended up with 3 pints of roasted peppers and 6 quarts of tomatoes (plus the aforementioned peach jam).  It certainly took a while to do, but we both really enjoyed ourselves. We kept thinking about what we will make this winter with our "put up" vegetables.  It really will be a joy to use our own, home grown produce for soups and stews.

~Y