WHAT ARE YOU CANNING TODAY?

[Justme]

Got about a gallon of salsa on the stove thickening right now. Also reducing a couple of quarts of blueberry juice which I'm gonna turn into soda pop syrup. And this morning I made a batch of pectin from the 100 or so June dropped apples.
Hopefully the salsa cooks down soon enough so I can water bath everything before my body says I gotta go to sleep tonight.

 

[Greybear23]

Hi, kinda new here, what do you do with the soda pop syrup? How do you make it and what can it be used for? What flavors? Also how do you get pectin from the apples and how do you store it and use it? Sorry for all the questions, Lynn!!!!

Got about a gallon of salsa on the stove thickening right now. Also reducing a couple of quarts of blueberry juice which I'm gonna turn into soda pop syrup. And this morning I made a batch of pectin from the 100 or so June dropped apples.
Hopefully the salsa cooks down soon enough so I can water bath everything before my body says I gotta go to sleep tonight.

 

[Corn Woman]

Sweet cherry jam. I lucked out this year and my trees made it thru the late spring frost. Usually I just get enough to eat and can only dream of canning
cases to stock up my pantry and give as gifts to family and friends.

 

[Wannabefree]

Corn and corn relish today

 

[Justme]

Hi greybear. About the soda pop syrup- this particular batch was blueberries. I just put the blueberries in a pot added acup or two of water to cover the bottom and started them cooking. Mash and stir occasionally. After they have cooked down and are really mushy strain out the juice from the pulp. I've found a two strain sytem works best for me - I secure cloth(I like old style cloth dippers best-not used as diapers of course) over a pot or bowl then set my mesh colander on it and dump the juice pulp mix into the colander. Let it drain and press on it some when it's almost dripped out. This gets the bulk of the pulp outta the way and the cloth catches the fine stuff. Then I return the juice to the stove and simmer till it reduces down to a concentration I like ,usually about half the amount i started with and then sweeten to taste. When ready to drink. Put some in a glass and SLOWLY (it tends to foam up) add soda water. we have a soda stream but you could also use club soda. Cannot say how much to add cause everyone's tastes and each batch are different. It's a trial and error thing but very forgiving not strong enough just add more. Too strong add more water. I canned this batch in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. We've done this with all kinds of fruits. Can also use the juice for Popsicles, and berry lemon aid too.

As for the pectin see this web site http://www.wildflowers-and-weeds.com/The_Forager/pectin.htm. In my case I have a very young apple tree which had about twoo hundred apples on it. So after they start the natural drop to help me pick off a few more (it hard to pick unripe baby apples but it'll be better for the tree I the long run) I decided to see if I could make pectin from them. Basically I followed what was on the website above- cut them up, stew them down, strain, concentrate a little more then canned for now till I decide to make some jam.

 

[Just Me]

Made a small batch of salsa and pickle relish today. I've always tried to wait until I have a big produce amount to can but this year we decided to can several times as we pick things to eliminate loss. So far it's worked great. I also put up two pints of dried parsley, 1/2 pint of dried sage, and a pint of dried basil.

 

[sweetproserpina]

Finally- strawberry jam! yahoo, roll on summer

Hopefully making scape pesto too!

 

[BarredBuff]

Did two batches of carrotts and ended up with 17 pints. Doing the last batch tomorrow, along with the last batch of chicken broth. We sadly didn't grow the carrotts, but were bought in bulk from Sam's club

 

[BarredBuff]

Put up 8 pints of carrott sticks, and 7 quarts of broth/stock in the canner....pretty good day

 

[k15n1]

Well, it's not actually "canning" per se, but I bought a bunch of butter on sale (1.75 $/lb) and made a batch of ghee. That'll keep for years, unlike bottled butter, which I'm told goes rancid within a year. Or maybe not. Anyway, it was 7 lb butter and it produced 6.5 pt, which is 1.85 C/lb, not 1.5 C/lb which is the number I found on the interwebs. It took about 2 hours, start to finish, to cook the water out of almost a gallon of butter.