Adventures in Canning

I tried my hand at canning this weekend. We've had an amazing tomato crop this year - due to our inability to sacrifice any of our plants at the "thinning" stage - and we had to do something with all the resulting tomatoes. (Even D couldn't eat them all.)

So.... I first looked for recipes. D's mom gave me a water bath & canning supplies and the Blue book, which is some kind of home food preservation bible. It turns out that no-one has ever tried to preserve yellow-pear or non-green varieties of cherry tomatoes, so that even though many websites strongly advise you not to modify recipes, I had to do exactly that. I settled for a batch of whole cherry tomatoes (yellow-pear, and red ones) with a few Thai red-dragon peppers and habaneros thrown in, and a pickle-like preserve (strongly modified) of the same tomatoes, lemons, and peppers.

Lesson #1 - Canning is a pain in the &*%!. It takes forever. The preserve thing had to be cooked for several hours, then sit overnight, then strained, the sauce reduced, and everything added back and boiled before you even get to washing all the jars in ultra-hot water, boiling the lids & actually canning. Also, my stove is not powerful enough to boil water without several hours of ramping up the temperature. On the bright side, the water bath got well over 212 degrees Farenheit. I'm not sure this was a good thing, and didn't know boiling water could get over 212.

Lesson #2 - Always wear gloves when cutting Habaneros, even if you are only cutting them in half and think that there's no way that a significant amount of burning is going to take place.

Lesson # 3 - When you're boiling something that contains a good amount of vinegar, don't stick your bare hands in the steam coming off of it. I thought at first that it was the Habanero juice that made my hands burn for many, many hours last night (and resisted ice water, vinegar, vinegar and peroxide, washing with lavendar soap, alcohol, yogurt treatments). But then they started burning again while I was reducing the sugar/water/vinegar sauce. Bare hands + cloud of acidic gas = severe pain that you really can't believe how badly it hurts. I finally had to go to bed with a bowl of ice water next to the bed. At some point, I finally fell asleep.

Lesson #4 - I always thought that canning was supposed to force all the air out of the jars. But, there's still space/an airlike substance at the top of my jars!!! They're sealed properly, and the Blue Book only emphasizes that the seal should be good, so we'll see if they start rotting/turning interesting colors in a few weeks. If not, my family members can expect canned goods (at least the preserves, which turned out really good) for Christmas this year.

Lesson #5 (see Lesson #1) - I think canning will be a once-a-year-thing.

Otherwise, I also made cookies today with my fabulous (no sarcasm) KitchenAid mixer. It's finally cold enough to really get my oven going, and this thing makes the whole thing so much quicker. Our friend J also came over today to work on the house (Yay!). He used to do stuff for us for free, but very infrequently. Now we pay him a modest amount, and since he's no longer working at his old company but running his own contracting/HVAC thing, he has more time for us (Plus we don't feel so bad about needing/accepting so much of his help).

One thing I didn't do, was get insulation done up in the unfinished attic. I bought the stupid insulation last January, but have not gotten around to it. sigh... someday I'll get it done.