The weekend's work

I got some canning done this weekend, some stuff from our gardens, some from the farmer's market, and some (the corn) a gift from our neighbors.

The tally, if I remember right:

• 5 quarts sweet corn
• 2 quarts yams in syrup
• 7 pints dill pickles
• 4 pints green beans
• 6 quarts Italian seasoned tomato sauce

I need to step up the pace here. I'm doing pretty well, but we need more.

I added 4 gallons of drinking water to our stores today, bringing us up around 60 gallons. These are gallon juice jugs. I save my own, and I have a couple of neighbors who put theirs in their recycling complete with the lids. (Everybody else throws the lids away separately, so I cannot use them.) I rinse them out well, add a couple of drops of liquid bleach, and fill them up with tap water; label them with the date, and stash them in the cellar. I'll be at my goal of 80 gallons at right about the time the oldest jugs are a year old, and I can start rotating them out.

In other news, we escaped Sunday evening to the same campground we camped at last month. It was a lovely day, not hot, not buggy. We took a supper with us and cooked it at over an open fire, and then Lil Miss A and I headed back home, while Barry and Kieffer backpacked into a pack-only campsite and spent the night. Really a lovely weekend. The kids start back to school on Thursday, so I'm glad we got to do one neat thing together before that happens.

Canning jars

Work has been slow this morning, which leaves me time to get into trouble.

I got to thinking about canning jars, and how I want more of them. :) I posted an appeal on Facebook for them and immediately got some offers. I picked up a dozen here in town and washed them up. Then I started wondering how many I actually have for the season and if I have enough Tattler reusable canning lids. Which led to over an hour spent gathering and counting and reboxing and re-storing canning jars.

Current tally of empties: **

17 large mouth quarts, 73 standard quarts
10 large mouth pints, 54 small mouth pints
5 miscellaneous (half pint or weird sized)
Totals: 26 large mouth jars, 131 standard

Now to count Tattler lids. I know I will need more standard at least.

By the way, I had always stored my rings separately, in a bag. It finally dawned on me that I never would use a jar without a ring, so I might as well put rings on all of them now, to save time when I need to use them. Duh.

No rings for the jars that have food in them, otherwise you might not notice if the seal failed. Just for the empties.

** edited because I found another box of jars

Pressure canning turkey

I'm trying something new (to me, at least). Right now I have about 30 pounds worth of turkey (2 birds, one large, one small) in a big stock pot with some herbs. I cut the turkeys apart but left the bones in. My plan is to cook them till nearly done, but not completely, strip the meat off the bones and pressure can it with its broth. I love the idea of having already cooked turkey meat ready to put into a recipe without defrosting. The freezer is also pretty full at the moment, and I want to make sure I keep a balance between canned and frozen foods anyway.

I'll let you know how it goes.

UPDATE: Two birds, 30 pounds dressed raw weight, ended up to be - drumroll please - about 7 quarts of cooked, boned meat. Wow. I thought it would be at least twice that.

Quarts are in the canner now for 90 minutes at 15 PSI. The bones are saved and I think I'll  cook them in the remaining broth (what I didn't use in the quarts) some more after the stove is available again.

Steam Juicing Apples and Pears

At long last I processed the pictures from how I used my steam juicer to juice some apples and pears last month. Two caveats: 1) I'm new to this, and 2) this is about the cheapest, smallest, most tinny-looking steam juicer you can buy. I did not want to invest mightily until I was sure this was going to be worthwhile. I think it is, and at some point I will buy a larger one of stainless steel.

Here are the parts of my steam juicer. 1) Water reservoir. 2) Juice pan with siphon tube. 3) Strainer basket. 4) Lid.

First is the water reservoir. This goes directly on the stove and is filled about 2/3 with water.

The juice pan is next.

It has this little wire clip that I don't trust, having learned the hard way that it doesn't do its job very well.

I direct it down into a Mason jar in the pot holder drawer. :o)

You fill the strainer pan with fresh fruit. Here I mixed tart apples with sweet pears. Wash the fruit and trim away any bad spots, but no need to chop, pit or peel. I cut the apples and pears in half or fourths just because, but you probably wouldn't even need to do that much.

Okay, so, we put the lid on and light the stove. We bring the water to a boil, and when steam starts to escape from around the rim of the lid, we turn it down to a simmer. We steam apples for 90 minutes. Here they are after maybe half an hour. Interestingly, the pears are holding their shape better than the apples. Not what I would have guessed.

If you like your juices clear, just let the fruit steam undisturbed. If you prefer it more unfiltered looking (and I do), stir the fruit every so often to break up the fibrous parts and infuse them into the juice. In fact, I pull off the juice and then run it back through the fruit again because I like a LOT of unfiltered stuff in my juice.

After 90 minutes. Wow! That's what's left. The pears had much less residue than the apples did. I was hoping for more, actually. I love pear sauce.

I forgot to take any pictures of the actual siphoning process, but it's just as well, as I burn myself every time anyway, without worrying about juggling a camera. Anyway, it comes out scalding hot, and if you siphon it directly into sterilized bottles or jars, you have a nice clean environment and don't need to water bath process afterward. Here you can see I appropriated some flip-top beer bottles Barry wasn't using. 

The leftover pulp gets run through a chinois strainer to make applesauce. Or, in this case, apple-pear sauce. That you do have to water-bath process, as by the time it's in the jars, it's well below scalding temperature and has been in contact with numerous preparation surfaces (chinois, bowl, spoon, etc.).

Meanwhile, I'm firing up the steamer again, this time with just pears. Don't forget to replenish the water in the water reservoir. You do not want this thing to cook dry.

And here's the yield from two steamer fulls of first apples and pears, then just pears. If I had used all apples, there would have been more yield. This is where you can see how a larger juicer would make sense, as I used a lot of energy doing this twice when one large steamer could probably have held more than the two loads I did.

My thanks to Judy Laquidara who first introduced me to the idea of steam juicing.