There’s been a whole lot of canning going on here

Our demo plans for our kitchen have been pushed back a couple of weeks. Because we decided to have our contractors hand build all the windows and doors for our mudroom, being built off the back entrance way to our kitchen. The glaze is drying on the windows, and the final door is being made in their wood shop.

All this means I am still savoring every day that is left before we go a month with no kitchen. SO, I have been able to get all my tomato canning and pesto making out of the way. When demo day does finally come, I can say I will be over all my canning projects, with all the jars boxed up in the basement waiting for a new home in my new cabinets.

But for now, here are some shots of the finished jars, and the work of canning. 

This year I skipped making jars of marinara and pizza sauce because pealing 25 pounds of tomatoes was too daunting. So I blanched them, let the skins slide right off and canned whole tomatoes to make sauce at a later time. 

Salsa! Made using my new Tattler tops and our shinny new stainless funnel that I loved enough to take picture of. For the salsa I started with a recipe from PickYourOwn.org. And then I added and tasted, and tweaked until it fit the taste buds of our family. All my girls LOVE blue corn chips and salsa, and it’s a snack I love for them to have. Which sparked this year’s first ever salsa canning adventure here at the Simmons house.

The recipe tweaking entailed only 1 jalapeño pepper (instead of six – YIKES) , only 2 onions and 2 garlic cloves. I had two large colanders overflowing with romo tomatoes to start out with, but I don’t think it equalled the 25 pounds the recipe called for, so I put a little less of all the other ingredients in the seasoning mix to balance it out. I added apple cider vinegar and more cumin (my kids like cumin and their favorite local salsa from the store has apple cider vinegar in the ingredients). We all gave it a final thumbs up taste taste before the salsa went into the canning jars to get preserved.

I love pesto. And, these little five jars were just the beginning. Last Wednesday Farmer Megan (our CSA farmer) had a bin full of basil that sat on hot ashphalt at one of her stops for too long, that she was going to toss at the end of the day. And since my house was the last stop for the day, I happily saved it and made 12 more jars of pesto that night.

For pesto – I use olive oil, parmesan cheese (or sometimes feta or a mix of whatever is in my fridge), pine nuts or walnuts or pecans depending on what I have, lemon juice, salt and pepper. I fill my food process to the brim with fresh basil, add about half-one cup of oil, a handful of nuts, a generous amount of fresh grated cheese, juice from half a lemon and salt and pepper to taste. Then I happily put pesto on everything – from pasta, to pizza, to sandwiches, to crackers with fresh goat cheese. I love pesto!

But wait…there is more canning to come. The pear trees in our backyard are ready to be picked. And, I’ll be doing a fruit swap with our dairy farmer for some of her apples to make apple sauce and apple butter.  YUM. 

And then, I’ll stop canning and do barely any cooking at all for a month, while we get a new kitchen. Soon, we will bid a final goodbye to these red formica countertops with the shinny chrome trim. Next up is a gorgeous white (or gray) marble counter top – that will be even more fun to use as a backdrop for photos like this.