Summer in a Canning jar

We have two very large vegetable gardens, two strawberry patches, raspberries, currants, blueberries, and rhubarb. Because of this, I spend a lot of time in the kitchen canning in late summer. It's very rewarding to go down into the root cellar and see shelves full of jars. To me those jars are summer. Each and every one is precious, I love opening them throughout the winter and tasting how wonderfully good home made preserves, veggies and pickles can be.

This year we made a lot of pickles, hot pickles, sweet pickles, curried pickles, bread and butter pickles, and pickled green beans. We're famous among our friends at parties for those green beans!

We just finished a batch of german red cabbage. We made this last year and when I tried some right out of the jar, I didn't like it. Then just last week I took out a jar and heated it...wow! It was better than any red cabbage I'd had in a restaurant. So, that solved the problem of "what do we do with all the red cabbages in the garden?"

We had trouble with tomatoes. They didn't ripen. So they're in boxes and ripening slowly. Every few days I get enough to make a few cups of sauced tomatoes for the freezer or a batch of salsa. If you grow tomatoes and do not have a Back to Basics Food Strainer and Sauce Maker...get one! I got mine at Ace Hardware. It looks like an old fashioned meat grinder with a big bowl on top. you wash the tomatoes, cut them in large chunks and grind them. The seed, skin, and core come out one end and you have nice tomato pulp out the other end. Gone are the days of me blanching tomatoes, dropping them into ice water, peeling, coring and seeding. Ugh! It is a nice quick way to process tomatoes for salsa.

We also bought a Mehu Maija steamer on Ebay. They are available at Amazon and Ebay, but I haven't ever found one locally. It's a Finnish invention that allows you to steam whole fruits in the top, and extract the juice via a tube at the bottom. No more cooking apples, running them through the ricer, then squeezing the pulp through a jelly bag! This baby made quick work of 5lbs of wild plums. We just put them in the top, set the top onto the pan of boiling water and let it simmer for 90 minutes. You then open the valve on the tube and fill jars with beautiful clear juice, ready to be canned or made into jelly. I'm looking forward to trying it on berries next year.