Friday, August 1, 2008
Putting food by (aka Canning)
I've been thinking about canning lately and thought this might be a good forum to get some good ideas. Here in North Carolina there don't seem to be many people who can—maybe it's a generational thing or maybe a geographical. I don't know. But I wonder do you can? And if you do, is there something that you have found really successful? Or anything that turned out disastrous? Use the comments to tell us about it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
So, my worst canning attempts was diced tomatoes. We tend to end up buying many cans and so I decided to try putting them up. I don't know if I used the wrong kind of tomato or if they were too ripe, but they looked good until they were processed. They came out almost totally liquified. I tried two different years. So, we've given up on diced tomoatoes.
My biggest success was roasted tomato sauce that then goes in the freezer. I read about it in a newspaper in Oregon. You simply halve the tomatoes and put them on a rimmed baking sheet at 425 and roast them until the skins blister and crack (there are some black spots on the skins). Let them cool, then dump them in the blender and puree them. Pour that into a freezer container and your done. You can use a strainer to strain out the seeds and skin. But they don't seem to bother us. It's great too, becuase you can do a batch with whatever tomatoes you've got, they don't all have to be ripe at the same time.
The key to my sucessful canning experiences is that I always enlist help. Generally Nedra and Heather get roped in to help, but recently Ashley and I did apricots (she shared a good fruit leather recipe from her friend) and sometimes friends from the ward help too.
I think that the key to success is to can or preserve the things your family will really eat. I think the things we like the best are apricot jam, pickles, chili sauce, strawberry freezer jam, and frozen pesto.
Just a note on pesto
This is an excellent time of year to buy or grow some basil and make a huge batch of your favorite. Freeze it in jam jars or freezer bags and it is an excellent gift at Christmas time or just a pleasant reminder of summer during the middle of the winter. Here is my favorite recipe.
Spinach Pesto Makes 2-3 cups
5 cups Packed Spinach, washed and dried
½ bunch Parsley
1 Garlic Clove
½ to 1 cup Fresh Basil
½ cup olive oil
1 tsp salt
2/3 cup pine nuts or unsalted shelled sunflower seeds
1 ¼ c grated Parmesan cheese
Put all ingredients into a food processor. Process to a coarse paste, this will take a few minutes, be patient. Serve over pasta (be sure to save some of the pasta cooking water to thin the pesto), or for the filling for a quesadilla.
Post a Comment