Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Cheap preservation

Last week we found a farm stand while driving through the country that offered c-h-e-a-p produce. 
We got 8 little peppers,10 pounds of pears, and a head of cabbage for $8! Crazy right? We are trying
 out some fun recipes this week, including 5 pints of pickled pears :)

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/09/pickled-seckel-pears-recipe.html

We hope to make this chutney over the weekend. We've recently become huge chutney fans... So expect more 
chutney photos from us!
http://bellejarcanning.com/2011/10/27/pear-ginger-chutney-definitely-fall-here/

Anne and Dennis were kind enough to gift us with more slicer tomatoes again this week. Since we devoloped a 
new process for processing them (haha)...  We thought we would share some pictures. We are huge fans of canning 
sauce because it is by far easiest for us to make. We don't even take the peels off! Before this week, we cored 
the tomatoes, let them cook down in the crockpot and then depending on our moods, either blended them up
or just skipped right ahead to canning. This box had a full layer of tomatoes when we started.

This week we blended the tomatoes immediately after coring them. That way we didn't have to wait for the 
tomatoes to burst their skins before starting to boil down, plus we like the consistency, PLUS then we didn't have to
deal with blending boiling hot liquids. 

Catherine was generous enough to lend us a crockpot plus we had this one of our own so we were able to cook these babies down in just a little over 12 hours (it is a thin sauce though.. I'd say a thick sauce would have been 2 more hours or so).

The final product: four more quarts of tomato sauce :)

No comments:

Post a Comment