2010 Canning Summary

Looking back, I neglecting posting about my canning in 2010. In fact, I hardly photographed it. Here's a list of this year's canning exploits. Much of this was given as gifts during our Christmas travels.


Strawberry Rhubarb Compote 5 (1/2 pints)
Strawberry Preserves (4) 1/2 pints
Strawberry Lavender Jam (2) 1/2 pints - More of this next year
Strawberry Juice (3) pints
Cherry Marmalade (8) 1/2 pints
Cherries in Syrup (2.75) qts,
Asian Pickles (4) pints (These were an experiment and I over-cooked them. Mushy pickles are not so good)
Bread & Butter Zucchini (2) pints
Crock Cured Dill Pickles (3 quarts) This was an interesting experience. I canned half of them and put half in the fridge. My mom says they are too salty so I didn't give any away. I also haven't opened the ones canned to compare the texture. My husband doesn't eat pickles so these are going very slowly.
Bread & Butter Pickles (9) pints
Blueberry Lime Jam (11) 1/2 pints
Lime Juice 1 (1/2) pint
White Grape Juice (4) pints
Dilly Beans (7) pints
Annie's Salsa (22) pints - I was very happy with this recipe. I used only the added tomato paste, not tomato sauce. We made it spicy and with the acid used 1/2 c. cider vinegar 1/4 c.lime juice, 1/4 c. lemon juice for a balanced flavor.
Tomato Sauce (3) quarts
Tomato Juice (2) quarts
Cider Jelly (15) 1/2 pints (pictured above)
Apple Sauce (7) pints

This comes to a total of (49) 1/2 pints, 62 pints, and 8.75 quarts, for a grand total of 51.25 quarts, or 12.8 gallons. Now to work on enjoying what we haven't given away, as well as to eat up the fruit and tomatoes we have stored in our freezer.

Sour Cherries

Our sour cherry tree only has a handful of small berries on it, but I went to a local orchard last week and picked 12 pounds of sour cherries. They said it wasn't a good year for sour cherries. Some trees had only a few, but I did find two that were loaded and easy picking.

With all the cherries, I made 1 cherry pie, 8 jelly jars of cherry-marmalade, and 3 quarts of cherries in light syrup.
The Cherry Marmalade recipe comes from the Ball Canning book, but I modified it for sour cherries. Here it is boiling away.
Cherry Marmalade
1 medium orange (including peel),seeded and finely chopped
1 quart pitted sour cherries
1/4 cup lemon juice
4 cups sugar
1 cinnamon stick

Cover chopped orange with water in a sauce pan, bring to a boil and cook about 20 minutes until soft. Add remaining ingredients, bring to a boil and cook about 35 minutes until it reaches the jelling point. Remove cinnamon stick. Pour into hot jars, leave 1/4 inch head space and process for 15 minutes in a boiling water bath. Makes about 4 half pints.

Strawberry Season

I just found out that strawberry season has come early to our area because of the warm spring. Last year the season began for me on June 24th! Now I hear we are already a couple of weeks into the picking.

Last Saturday I made some Strawberry Rhubarb Compote from a recipe from Doris and Jilly, with rhubarb from the farmers market, but the strawberries were from California. It made 6 pints. I immediately opened one to test it in my yogurt. It was perfect, not to sweet. I'm saving the rest for this fall when we can't get fresh strawberries.


Today we picked a few pints today for strawberry pie, but the patch was too crowded and over-picked to get enough for jam. I'm going to try another farm later this week. I have one more official day of work on Monday and then school's done! It looks like I will be finished packing my room by then too. So I'll probably be headed to the farm on Tuesday and the fun of freezing and canning berries can begin. I hope there are some still out in the field!

Quince & Apple Canning

I've been a bit behind on reporting on activities here on the blog. At the end of last month we harvested quince from the bush and made quince jelly. Someone commented elsewhere asking how big the bush it. I would say it's about 5 feet in diameter. There is a picture of the whole bush at the end of this post from last year.

We picked 8 lbs of quince on the 21st and made it into juice in two ways. For every 3 1/2 lbs we added 7 cups of water. We had to fill two large stock pots with the quartered fruits and water. One pot full was strained through jelly bags overnight in the traditional way, yielding 8 cups.We put the other batch through the food mill to remove the seeds and skins but preserve more of the pulp. We got 9 cups from this batch.

For every cup of juice, we added one cup of sugar and then cooked each batch for about an hour with 2-4 tbsp of lemon juice added. The strained juice batch yielded 9 half-pint jars.
The milled juice yielded 10 half pint jars. Both batches had a little more left on the side which we put in the fridge for a taste test. The milled jelly is not quite as refined of a flavor as the strained juice. As far as color goes, it is similar but is not quite as clear, and has a hint more of orange. It has been so rainy lately we haven't gotten a good side-by-side of the two jars. Below is a jar of the strained jelly that wouldn't fit in the canner so went straight to the fridge.
We're very pleased with how much quince jelly we made this year since we thought it was the best we made last year, but had to use and share it sparingly. This year there is plenty to go around.

Our other canning endeavor was apple-quince butter. We went apple picking the last weekend in September and had a coupon for some money off a half-bushel of pick your own. So we picked a half-bushel. We were careful to first pick two varieties of cooking apples and then two varieties of eating apples so we would be able to separate them when we got home. My husband wanted to make apple butter, and we decided to throw some quinces in too.
We used 2 lbs 10 oz of quince and 3 lbs of apples (a mix of Cortland & Mac). We quartered them and added 7 cups water. We brought it to a boil and cooked until soft. Then we put the pulp through a food mill. Here's my husband using it.
We decided to cook it in the crock pot. We had 14 cups of pulp and added 4 cups of white sugar and 1 1/2 cusp of brown sugar. We started it on high with the lid ajar for a few hours and then turned it on low when we went to bed. The next morning it still needed more time so we left it on while we went to church. We forgot and came back later in the afternoon to it being done, but some of it starting to crisp around the edges of the crock pot. It had reduced by half and darkened significantly in color. We processed it in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes and yielded 8 half-pint jars. I still need to photograph it to show how dark it got.

Blueberries & Pickles

Last Thursday I picked 13 lbs of blueberries at a local farm. I canned 3 quarts and 9 1/2 pints. We also enjoyed two blueberry cobblers over the next week (my husband and I have different family traditions about cobbler :) and a blueberry pie.

On my way to pick the blueberries I stopped in a local quilt store for some thread. The owner was giving away zucchini and pickling cucumbers so I took 3 1/2 lbs from her and used them to make bread & butter pickles. One cucumber from my garden made it into the batch. I need a much bigger garden if I'm going to put up my own pickles in the future. I made 6 pints of bread and butter pickles. My Blue Lake beans made one pint jar of dilly beans.

This week I made some more pickles. With over two pounds of cucumbers from the farmers market and over three pounds of green beans from a farm stand, I made 7 more pints of dilly beans,
and 5 more pints of bread & butter pickles.

Yard Sale Find (More Jars)

Last Saturday we drove around to yard sales. At one, I found a large box of jars for $2. That was a deal I couldn't pass up.The box included 15 quart jars, 22 pint jars, and 6 wire closure jars (2 qt, 4 pint). Here is the spread of the regular quart and pint jars after being washed. I haven't washed the wire closure jars. I learned that its best to wash one or two at a time so that you can make sure to put the wire closure and glass lids back with the right jar.
There were a few interesting jars among the bunch. One is a larger quilted jar, another is an extra large wide mouth jar.
Two quart jars are square and are labeled as Canadian Ball Jars, with French on one side. I think the square shape is nice because they fit closer together on the shelf.

Currants and Raspberries

After making one jar of currant jelly on Tuesday I decided I wanted to make more. So we returned to Cherry Hill Farm and picked seven and a half pounds of currants last Thursday. Currants are fairly easy to pick. You just lift up the branch, and strands of currants hand down. You lift the whole strand off the branch.
I used the recipe from Joy of Cooking's: All About Canning. Basically you wash the currants, but don't have to remove them from the stem. You put them in a pan stems and all, crush some of them to release the juice, and bring to them to a boil. Then simmer the currants for about 10 minutes until all the berries have burst. Strain the juice through a jelly bag. For every cup of juice, add 3/4 to 1 cup of sugar. Bring to a boil in a large pan and cook until the jelling point. Pack into jars that have been sterilized in boiling water for 10 minutes. Then process the jelly for 5 minutes. My yield was (7) 1/2 pint jars of jelly.
The owner also gave us some of these champagne currants. I cooked them separately and then mixed in some of the red currant juice so that I had enough to make one 1/4 pint jar of jelly. We'll have to wait and see if it tastes any different, but it is a lighter color.While we were at Cherry Hill Farm we couldn't resist picking some raspberries as well. We picked about two quarts.
Matt had made a great apple tart before from Joy of Baking.com. So I headed there and found a Raspberry Cream Cheese Tart Recipe. We added in a few currants too, and it looks like they burst in the cream cheese during the cooking. It's a very good tart and we're still enjoying it for breakfasts.

Tart Cherries

On Monday, my sister and I drove out to Hicks Orchard just across the border in NY state to pick tart Montmorency cherries. The cherry trees were grafted on semi-dwarf rootstock, but my sister and I are of semi-dwarf stock ourselves. There was wonderful fruit out of reach at the top of the trees, and a fair amount of good fruit within reach. We worked hard for an hour, stretching and reaching to pick ten and a half pounds of cherries. What surprised us was how many picked right off the stem. We drove from Hicks Orchard to Cherry Hill Farm to pick red currants. It only took us ten minutes to fill a couple of quarts.

Here are the fruits of our picking: red currants and Montmorency tart cherries.
The first thing I made with them was a cherry-currant jam. I got the recipe from Seasonal Ontario Food and I liked it because it uses the natural pectin in the currants rather than adding additional powdered pectin. The cooking down to the jelling point took longer for me, about 45 minutes, but it always seems to be slow on my stove. We ended up with (6) 1/2pint jars of cherry-currant jam.
While the jam was cooking down, I experimented with picked cherries from the NY Times. I have no idea how these will taste, but they sure look beautiful. It was quick and easy to make them, hopefully it will be worth it.
The final cherry preparation for the day was a fresh cherry pie. We used the recipe from the Joy of cooking, which only adds sugar, cornstarch, and a dash of almond flavoring. It is already half gone.
Today I had to decide what to do with the remaining cherries and currants. I decided that I have lots of jam already and that a cherry pie in the middle of winter would be a wonderful thing. So the remaining cherries were canned in a 30% sugar syrup. They measured 8 cups before they went in the pan, but when I ladled in to the jars, I only ended up with one quart jar and one 1/2 pint jar. So we will have one cherry pie sometime this winter, and some cherries on ice cream another time. The cherries look beautiful in the jar, though they all push towards the top.The remaining currants made one 1/2 pint jar of jelly which is very good. It is good enough that I'll probably be picking more currants soon to make more for Christmas gifts.

Strawberry Season

Today I went to a local farm and picked 20 pounds of strawberries. It is early in the season so it was hard work finding the ripe berries. Here's what is happening to all those berries.

• I canned 9 half pints of Strawberry Jam.
• I'm in in the process of making 7 or 8 more jars of Strawberry Preserves. They are plumping overnight before being canned tomorrow.
• I set aside two quarts to make Strawberry Pie for a picnic on Friday.
• I made the strawberry syrup to mix with cream for making a batch of Strawberry Gelato.
• I put one cookie sheet full of strawberries in the freezer.
• And I made a strawberry-mango cobbler for dinner tonight. ( I added a bit of cinnamon and cardamom to the recipe. If you like your cobbler sweet, add more sugar to the fruit).

There may be a few extras left for eating, but I may have to go pick some more next week for us to snack on.
Earlier this week we were perusing my favorite canning book, The Joy of Cooking: All About Canning & Preserving, and saw a recipe for Mango Preserves. When we went to the store on Sunday, mangos were on sale. So yesterday I started Mango Preserves and did the canning of them today.
Preserves take two days because first you let the fruit and sugar sit in a cool place for 4-8 hours, then you bring the fruit to a boil and to the jellying point. Then the fruit sits overnight to plump so it won't float in the jars. Finally you return the fruit to a boil before processing it in a boiling water bath.

The summer canning season is off to a good start!

New (to me) Jars

Every Columbus Day weekend one of the local town fire departments has a large fundraising yard sale. People donate to the sale and they always have quite an assortment of furniture, books, and odds and ends. We've gone the past two years and found some nice finds. Last year my husband got a first edition G.K. Chesterton book for the hardback price of $1. This year I picked up a stack of 30 Cooks Illustrated Magazines from the past few years that I'm looking forward to reading. I also found a whole bunch of wire clamp top canning jars. I picked through the three boxes and chose 10 that had the least rust on the wires. They are an assortment of sizes and brands, both Atlas and Ball.

I already have a few wire clamp jars that I use for more decorative purposes. These hold a collection of shells and sea glass collected in Newfoundland.
However, I wanted to use the new jars for storing food. I looked around on the internet for rubber seals so that I could use them to store food. I found a site in California, but by the time I paid for shipping it was going to be $20 for the seals! I'd only paid 25 cents a jar, so that seemed quite ridiculous. I decided to stop by the local grain and feed store that has canning supplies and was pleasantly surprised to find he had dozen for $2.45. That was more like it. Now that we've cleaned up the jars and run them through the dishwasher they are being put to good use storing dry goods. We use other canning jars for food storage also, but then find that every time I need to can, my jars are in use. I don't plan on canning with these jars, though some people still do. I'll be using them to store some foods that sit on top of our bread box for easy access.
We'll be looking forward to the Fireman's Foliage Sale next fall.

Canning Round Up

After the last batch of tomatillo salsa, my husband suggested to me that maybe it was time to stop canning for the year. I wondered whether I'd be able to let apple season pass by without jars of apple sauce, but decided we don't really eat apple sauce so it would be silly to go ahead and can it.

I wondered how much I had actually canned this summer. I couldn't go count the jars because we've already started to give some away. So I took a look back at the notebook I keep with my canning notes. Each time I can, I write down recipes, notes, and yields for each batch.

My totals are:

1/2 pint jars : 63
pint jars: 46
quart jars: 7

This is a total of 35.75 quarts or almost 9 gallons of fruits and vegetables.