Home Canning Season 2008

The frenzy of food preservation hit us just as hard this summer as last year. In 2007 we had attempted to put away as much food for the winter as we could, partly due to our desire to avoid India-grown pickles and California-grown tomatoes throughout the winter as much as we could, and partly just to learn how to do it.

Some things disappeared really quickly - I think we had eaten most of our 20 jars of tomatoes by January. The chow, relish and pickles were gone by mid-winter too. When spring finally arrived, all we had left was some pickled cauliflower, ikra and salsa.
This year I tried to focus a little more on the stuff that went early last year, and a couple of new things like the sauerkraut mentioned in an early post.

I decided not to can tomatoes or tomato sauce this year. Because tomatoes aren't that acidic, you have to process them forever in a boiling water canner to safely can them. All that extra cooking didn't do too much for the flavour, either. This summer, whenever I had a few ripe tomatoes from our garden, I tossed them into the freezer whole. I also froze a big batch of tomato sauce in plastic yogurt containers and I also processed about 25 pounds of farmer's market tomatoes by roasting them in the oven until their skins blackened. I saved the run-off tomato juice to drink, and froze the roasted tomatoes in big blocks.
I also froze most of the swiss chard, kale and spinach that we got from the CSA so I could use them in soups and stews all winter long.


I went a little crazy with the pickles this year. I pickled everything - carrots, garlic scapes, green beans, zucchini and the odd cucumber. Between my garden, our CSA deliveries, and the farmer's market, there were a lot of vegetables to process as soon as they came in the house.

One day stands out in my memory in particular. I woke up early to cut up cucumbers and zucchini so they could sit in salt during the day when I was at work (the salt draws out the moisture from the cut vegetables and keeps them crunchier once they're pickled). My plan was to spend the evening canning the pickles and then making venison meatloaf for a friend at work and then doing laundry for my trip to Quebec.
At work that day, I received some free Bomber tickets for a game that very evening. I'm not the biggest football fan, but Jeff loves going to the games, (especially when they're free) so I accepted them, thinking that Jeff could find a buddy to take to the game and I could continue my evening pickling plans. So when I got home, I started boiling the water in the canner, and Jeff started calling his friends. By the time I was into mixing up the venison meatloaf however, he conceded defeat at finding anybody to go with him to the game. The onus was on me to accompany him to the damn football game. At this point, kickoff was about an hour and 15 minutes away. No problem, right?

At about this time I checked my e-mail. There was a new message from the Landless Farmers (our CSA) saying that there were FREE EXTRA CUCUMBERS available for pick-up a couple of blocks away on a first come, first serve basis. My mind raced... If I could get Jeff to run over and pick up a couple more pounds of cukes, I could get the meatloaf in the oven in the meantime, and then when I got the cucumbers from Jeff, I'd cut them into slices and get them soaking in salt by the time the meatloaf was ready to come out of the oven in time to go to the football game, and then I could can them when we came home from the game! I could make it all work! We might miss the beginning of the game, but it would all work out!


For some reason Jeff agreed to this plan and he ran off to fetch the free cukes. He must really love me. Or maybe he just loves pickles. I don't know.


To make everything more stupid, I decided that I didn't want to make sweet bread and butter pickles from this new batch of cucumbers - I wanted sour dill pickle rounds even though I had no dill. Wasn't it convenient that there was a Safeway directly on our way to the football stadium? It was a strange feeling to walk into the game with huge fronds of dill erupting from my purse - I got my share of heckling for my dill from the drunken football fans, but I felt quite vindicated when the Bombers actually won the game, the first win of the season.


I totally chalk that up to the dill. Anyway, the Bombers won, the second batch of pickles were successfully processed and EVERYTHING WORKED OUT.

I didn't do a proper count of everything we canned this year, but this picture shows what my pantry looks like right now. Lots of relish, chow, sauerkraut and salsa and LOTS of pickles.