Putting up Salsa

Growing up, we ate a lot of ketchup - on french fries, on fish sticks, you name it, we poured ketchup on it. In 1991 something happened, sales of salsa in American households overtook ketchup, and we've never looked back.  Today, we don't even have a bottle of ketchup in the house, although there are a few packs of it in the fridge leftover from the few times that we go to fast food restaurants.

When we have a decent tomato crop (we didn't last year), we try to put up some salsa in pint jars.  We grow a wide variety of heirloom tomatoes: Black Krim, Cherokee Purple, Pink Brandywine, Organic Rainbow Blend, Black Tomatoes, Creole, Chadwick Cherry, Mortgage Lifter and Black Vernissage.  My two favorites are probably Black Krim and Chadwick Cherry.  They give us a nice mix of colors and flavors that go well in salsa.

We chopped onions, grated garlic, sliced up a bunch of cilantro and diced jalapenos, anaheims, and hot banana peppers:

We blanch the tomatoes and slice the skins off and cut out the cores.

Here's a big bowl of just blanched tomatoes.  You can see the skins are wrinkled and ready to be removed.

All the cut up tomatoes and vegetables are thrown in a big pot.

I wish you could smell this as it starts to cook.  We have so much in the pot, we keep a close eye on it as we don't want it boiling over!

We ladle the salsa in the pints with a canning funnel and can the pints of salsa following the canning instructions and then pull them out.  We set them on a towel and listen intently for the crisp "POP!" as each one seals.  When the last one seals, our job is done.  17 jars for the first batch.

It's beautiful salsa from homegrown ingredients.

How fast will 17 jars disappear?

Tomato Crop 2024

The tomatoes are finishing up.  We planted a number of heirloom varieties.  The only ones that are still making right now are the Chadwick Cherries.  With the heat intensifying, the fruit doesn't set and the stink bug and leaf-footed bugs are damaging the tomatoes that remain.  The birds, mockingbirds and blue jays, are pecking at the ones still on the vines.  For weeks, though, we were picking big beautiful baskets of tomatoes like this every day.

 I attribute the good crop this year to several factors.  First, we had a cooler than normal spring and it stayed cooler well into May.  That allowed the plants to stay healthy, without heat stress and bug pressure.  On top of that, though, the tomatoes were bigger and healthier than they've ever been when we transplanted them.  That gave them a big head start.

Here is a nice Pink Brandywine tomato.  It is heavy and unscarred by bugs.

It has green shoulders.

And  a nice profile!

Once we had around 18 pounds of tomatoes ready to go, we'd blanch them and core them and pull off the skins.

These are ready to go in the pot to cook.

We boil them and allow them to reduce down.  We made stewed tomatoes, tomato sauce, and salsa.  The times and recipes differed a bit depending on what we were making.

Once ready, we ladled into jars and then water-bath canned them.

When they were ready, we pulled them out and allowed them to cool on the kitchen counter.  It is a pleasing sound to hear the "POP" of the lids sealing.

 Finally, once they had cooled and sealed, we took the rings off and stored in the pantry.  We made pints, quarts and half pints.  When all was done, we counted them up.  We have 97 quart equivalents canned in the pantry.  That may hold us over until the next tomato crop!  We'll see how the inventory holds up.  We may not need to plant a fall crop.

Canning Sweet Corn

We harvested the last half row of Stowell's Evergreen Sweet Corn.  We always know its ready when the silk turns dark brown.  The ears are snapped off of the stalk and the stalk is tossed over the fence where the cows, goats and chickens make quick work of the corn stalks.  I always eat one ear raw out in the garden.  So sweet and fresh!  The rest I brought inside.

We shuck the corn, trying to pull most of the silk off and put the shucks in a big bucket.  I use a knife to cut off some worm-damage, but really it's not much.  We'll throw the husks and parts of the cob to the animals as well.  What they don't eat, we compost.  Then I use a vegetable brush to brush off any remaining silk.  They're small ears, but they are pretty.  They taste sweet, too.

Here's the corn all ready to process.  Not a lot, but it'll be good for our purposes.

Using a sharp chef's knife, I cut the corn off the cob.  Then I use a butter knife to scrape the cob, getting the 'milk' and remaining corn off the cob.

A close up shot of the corn cut off the cob.

All the corn is put into a big pot and a cup of water is added for every 2 cups of corn.  We found a recipe for Mexican Style Corn and we'll be following it.

We cut up onions, tomatoes and jalapeno peppers and salt and added into the pot.  This is all stirred up and is brought to a boil.

We use a canning funnel and ladle the hot corn mixture into the 10 pint jars, filling them up while leaving 1 inch headspace.  The tops are cleaned and the lids are put on with the rings added, finger tight.

We added the pint jars to the pressure canner.  Ours fits all ten jars.  We did have a little remaining, but we froze a quart zip loc bag full.  We'll eat that as a side dish at some point.

We can it at 10 pounds of pressure for 85 minutes.  The timer is started once the little weight on top starts rocking.  Once 85 minutes is done and the timer goes off, the canner is removed from the heat.  The jars are pulled out when the pressure drops and the satisfying sound of the lids popping echoes in the kitchen as they cool.

We'll stack these up in the pantry.  First, we did try the Mexican Corn as this was our first time to make it.  The corn thickened up after cooking.  The onions gave it nice flavor, but the jalapeno peppers took the flavor up several notches!  I remember as a kid eating Mexican Corn.  I think Green Giant made it in little cans.  Always enjoyed it back then.  We'll enjoy it now when we open a jar of it!

Snap Beans - Four Ways!

The Spring harvest is on!  Tricia picked up a nifty basket from her mom that is coming in useful.  We filled it with zucchini, yellow crookneck and yellow straightneck squash.

But it's not just the squash coming in.  Our snap bean crop looks to be a bumper crop.  We've never picked this many on the first picking.  Tricia gave me "the look" when I started carrying all this in.  Harvesting is not the end of the work.  While they're fresh, we have to preserve the harvest.

Below you'll see Blue Lake Bush beans, Contender beans, Italian Roma beans and Purple TeePee beans.

We eat a bunch of them fresh.  So good. We like to cook them with new potatoes and butter.  Lately, we've been cooking them with tasso and that adds great smoky, seasoned flavor.

We also snap them and pressure can a number of pints.  The pressure cooker holds 10 quart jars at a time, so we try to do them in 10 pint batches.

With some of the straightest of the Blue Lake Bush beans, we pickled them in a vinegar solution with dill and red pepper flakes and garlic.  Crispy pickled green beans.  Yum!!

Then we blanched and froze six additional quart bags of Contenders.

The water bath canner holds 7 pints, so we have 7 pints of pickled beans.  In the pressure canner, we snapped and canned 10 pints of contenders/blue lake bush beans and 10 pints Italian Roma beans.

Tricia labeled them with dates and they're ready to go in the pantry.

Then for the fourth preservation method, we're trying something we've never done.  We are dehydrating some snap beans.  First we snapped them.

Then we blanched them.  They come out such a bright, healthy color.

Then we line the dehydrator trays (all 7 of them) with beans.  Here's the contenders:

Here are the Italian Romas:

After about 10-12 hours of drying, here's what they look like:

Seven trays made 2 quart jars of dried snap beans.

While we have fresh, we're eating fresh picked beans.  But in the late summer and winter, we'll try putting the dried beans in soups and stews and see how they turn out once they're rehydrated.  I ate a few of them plain.  They had a snap to them like potato chips.  They needed some salt, though!  Always looking for new ways to preserve the harvest.

Carrots For Days

Normally, we're harvesting the fall crop of carrots in February.  Our very cold weather delayed everything.  In fact, I thought it had killed our carrots.  I even planted two rows of spring carrots, which I never do, as I thought all hope was lost.  But alas!  The fall carrots rebounded and we had a reduced, but still sufficient harvest.

On a recent trip to where she grew up in Corpus Christi, my wife returned with a big basket that my mother-in-law had given her.  It works out nicely for harvesting.  We have a nice haul of Danvers carrots.  They're our 'normal' orange variety.

Then I picked the other two rows of the other varieties of carrots we have planted.  We fed the carrot tops to the animals by the fence watching our every move.

Here is a better look at the varieties after they're all washed up.  On the left, we have the Cosmic Purple Carrot.  It is purple on the outside with an orange flesh.  The one in the middle is your regular run of the mill Danvers carrot.  The one on the right is my favorite.  It is the Atomic Red Carrot.  It has a beautiful red color all the way through.

We eat a bunch of them, mainly oven roasted with olive oil and salt and pepper topped with some fresh parsley.  But we preserve a bunch, too.  We will can some of them.  We dice them up with a food chopper and then blanch them and bring them to a cool temperature in ice water.

We bag up a lot of quart bags of carrots.  These work perfectly for a quick meal as a side dish or, our new favorite, Cream of Carrot soup.  Into the freezer they go until we're ready.

We are trying a new experiment this year in dehydrating some carrots.  We'll do a couple of trays to see how they come out.

This is the same tray as above after drying.  Wow, they kind of went away, didn't they?

We'll put them in a jar like this.  When we were finished, we had a pint full of dehydrated carrots.

Tricia is thinking that when we don't have fresh carrots, she can throw a couple of tablespoons into stews where they'll rehydrate.  We'll know how this experiment turns out and whether or not this is something we will continue to do as another option to preserve the harvest.

Canning Ground Beef

Canned meat has always sounded unappetizing to me, for some reason.  I guess I think about those little cans of potted meat and it reminds me of dog food.  Some people like it, but I've never been a big fan.  Different strokes for different folks, I guess.  We decided, in an effort to diversify, to can some meat and put it up in the pantry.  In the event of a disaster, we could lose everything in the freezer if the power went out for an extended period of time.

Since our cows gave us heifers two years ago, we didn't have any bull calves to bring to the slaughterhouse and our inventory in the freezer is running low.  So Tricia drove to Elliott's Slaughterhouse in Morse, Louisiana (where we bring our beef for butchering) and she bought some fresh ground meat - twenty pounds of it.  She put it in a big pot (14 pounds of it) and cooked it.

She cooked it all down, after adding salt.  I won't show this.  Everyone knows how to cook ground meat.  For canning, they recommend that you drain off as much of the fat as you can.  

As the meat cooked, we washed the jars, rings and lids.

When the meat was cooked, we used canning funnels to load the pint jars with meat.

We filled them up to the top and pressed it down a little.

You're aiming to have them filled an inch from the top.

We added a little boiling broth or water to cover.

Then we put half of the jars into the pressure canner, adding water and a tablespoon of vinegar .

Let the steam go out the top pipe for ten minutes and them put the weight on the top.  We did ten pounds of weight.  The pressure valve will pop out.

The top weight will begin to rock.  That's when you start your timer.  We pressure canned it for 75 minutes.  When the time is up, we turn off the stove and move the pressure canner off the heat until the pressure falls.  You are not to open the lid until the pressure falls.

Then it's time to use canning tongs to remove the canned meat for further cooling.

We cool them off and then will label them and stack them in the pantry.

It's good to have a little food stacked away.  Meat canned this way has a shelf life of 2 to 5 years.