Saturday, September 5, 2009

Canning

I had a good day. Not only did Michigan Football kick butt, I canned some tomatoes! What an experience. I have to say it is not all that hard, just a little time consuming. My tomatoes have been doing very good but they aren't producing enough at one time to use them solely for canning. Therefore, I made a run this morning to the local farmers market and picked up a few pounds of organic heirloom tomatoes. I don't exactly know how many pounds of tomatoes I canned, but I now have ten 12 oz jars!
I forgot to take a pic of the tomatoes before the skins were off. But here they are skinned and getting mashed and cooked.
And here are the cooked tomatoes with lemon juice and salt getting ready to process.
Here they are in their water bath. I don't have a canning pot but this worked pretty good. It was a little tight with such tall jars! They stayed in here for about 40 mins.
The finished product! I was a little nervous about the space at the bottom of the jars but after a quick search on Flickr it seems that this is very common.



Now what to can next..... except I am out of jars and don't really want to buy more. Which is why these are not pints... these are what I had on hand.

I got a lot of info from these sites:
www.thriftyfun.com -this is a pdf