I made spaghetti sauce over the weekend. It was a three-day project!
Saturday: buy tomatoes at the Farmer's Market, give self pep talk about canning
Sunday: blanch, peel, boil, strain, sautee, simmer (the simmering took about 9 hours, I kid you not! - but I had the temp too low)
Monday: simmer a bit more, pressure can 6 pints of spaghetti sauce, eat leftovers for dinner
Here are my totals at this point, including the recipe and method used:
strawberry jam, 6/09, 6 pints, pectin box recipe(?), WB
pickled cauliflower, 7/09, 5 pints, BBB, WB
pizza sauce, 9/20/09, 4 pints, Allrecipes, PC
applesauce, 9/15/09 and 9/21/09, 9 pints, Presto PC instruction book, PC
crushed tomatoes, 4 pints, PC
spaghetti sauce (20 lbs of tom.), 9/28/09, 6 pints, PC
BBB= Ball Blue Book
WB= water bath canning
PC= pressure canning
If there's one thing I've learned from this year's canning experiences, it's that it really is okay and a good thing to do the tasks in segments. It doesn't all have to be done in one five-hour shot! (And that's a good thing, because with kids, it can't be done in a five-hour shot!)
I keep thinking that I may be done with canning for the year, but then I think how nice it would be to have a few more pints of something on the shelves. (Four measly pints of pizza sauce? We can blast through that in one month, easily!) So who knows. I do want to pick apples one more time this year. We shall see.
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Your experience reminds me of the time I made ketchup. We boiled it most of the day and ended up with about a pint of ketchup. It probably would have been better if I would have started with paste tomatoes instead of the regular ones. I don't think I'll ever try to make ketchup again.
ReplyDeleteI could not agree more about the doing it in segments! I am canning (again) today and find that I actually *love* the process when each weekend only brings one or two projects... yay for canning!
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