What I've Canned This Fall...In Case You're Interested

Well, it's finally time to put away my steam canner and give it a rest...for a month or two, at least. Because it's been a busy few weeks in the Barrett kitchen!

Since we went to Apple Annie's a couple of weeks ago, I have had a lot of produce sitting around the house, waiting to be canned. In fact, I've been spending most of my free time canning since that trip! However, my fall canning "season" started well before the trip to Willcox. As a rule, I spend much of late August/early September canning every year, regardless of what my haul is from Apple Annie's. Maybe it's the time of year that puts me in the mood; maybe it's all the produce going on sale in time for the fall harvests--maybe it's a little of both.

This may seem pretty boring to some, but I thought I'd list off all the food I've canned at home this season. All in all, it's been an average year for canning (although I did have to buy a new pallet of canning jars, so I think I am a little ahead of the curve this time!). I should also probably say that, despite what some may think, I am NOT a world-class home canner! I do a nice variety of foods, but I don't can nearly the amount that many dedicated canners do. Here's a look at my pantry, after my canning was all done:

DISCLAIMER: not all those jars are newly canned. Many are left over from 2011

Now, if I was a real, hard-core, provident-living guru, my whole pantry would be filled with those jars, from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. As you can see, it's just a few rows of stuff. Oh, and my salsa, which is on the other side of the pantry:

In broad terms, I'm a bit of a minor-league canner. Maybe if my kids were a little older and could help me (or at least stay out of my way!), I'd get a little more done. Chances are good that I will be canning more as they get older (and consume more food!). At any rate, though, I'm still very proud of what I've accomplished. Home canning is hot, lengthy work, but the sense of satisfaction you get at the end of it is incalculable. It's so wonderful to feel that you are preserving food for your family's good that will last a long time!

To fully chronicle my canning in 2012, I'd have to go back to earlier in the year, when I made two different batches of jam...blueberry-orange, and blackberry mango.

Those jams, plus many more, are featured in this picture.

As you can see by this picture, I have a jam problem. I just can't stop making it! The result is a whole lot of pint jars stacked high in my pantry. We love the jam, but we just don't go through it as fast as I make it! Some of these jams are years old (there's even one at the bottom of the picture that was processed in 2008!). At least we're well-prepared for an apocalypse in which nothing will be left of America but bread and peanut butter.

We picked a lot more apples than this; this is after most of the canning!

I've also canned two small batches of applesauce this year: one in February (made from Fuji apples, one of our favorites for applesauce), and one last week (made from the Criterion apples we picked at Apple Annie's). The Criterion batch was a little too "sour" for it to be truly good applesauce, but it will probably still please my kids. Since I picked so many apples this year, I decided to make a few jars of sliced apples (to be used in pies, desserts, etc.) for good measure, too!

(I may be posting about my canning a little prematurely--I do have one more round of canning to do before the year is out. My absolute favorite applesauce is made with Jonathan apples. They are just a little tart and firm enough that they can well; plus their red skins give the applesauce a beautiful rosy color. As soon as a local store puts the Jonathan apples on sale--this is usually in October or November sometime--I plan on buying at least 30 pounds of the apples and making them into yummy tart-sweet applesauce, thus making my shelf even more full.)

My Month of Canning (aka August/early September) started when I bought a 20-lb. case of peaches from Bountiful Baskets, a local produce co-op. I decided to do several jars of peaches, since we were running a bit low in the pantry. Then I had enough peaches (and pint jars) left over that I succumbed to the "jam bug" once again, and made some peach jam (with mango!) for the first time in several years.

I just love the color of freshly canned peaches...such a beautiful sunny yellow-orange!

A couple of weeks later, I also canned my salsa for the year. We still had more jars than usual left over from 2011, so I thought I would "only" do a double-batch this time. I've blogged about canning salsa before, but I tried a new trick this year that I wanted to document:

As before, I still grilled/roasted all the chile peppers and garlic (instead of using the George Forman grill this year, I put them in the oven and drizzled a tiny bit of oil over them). However, instead of just putting the roasted peppers into storage bags to puree later with the tomatoes, I pureed all the chiles and garlic together in advance, to make this paste:

I stored these bags in the fridge overnight, and on the actual day of the canning, I poured the paste into the boiling tomato mixture. Just before doing that, though, I also pureed most of the cooked tomatoes together with the onions! Long story short, I pureed most of the salsa ingredients together this time around. I thought this might make the texture very thick.

I was right! (this time) Here's a picture with a jar of salsa from 2011 (on the left) and a jar from 2012 (on the right). As you can see, the newer batch is a lot smoother and a little "greener"--probably from the pureed green chiles. The pureeing also distributed the heat of the chiles better throughout the tomato base. The result is maybe the tastiest batch of salsa I've made yet! If anyone wants to try my salsa recipe, I recommend pureeing the chiles in advance, and then pureeing the tomatoes with the onions. The result is a salsa whose texture feels store-bought. Very delicious!

After going wild at Apple Annie's and buying enough produce for a third batch of salsa, I finally finished out with about 13 total quarts for the year. Here's the picture again of all the salsa in my pantry (as of this writing, there's another quart sitting in the fridge!):

There are three different batches of salsa pictured here: the 2011 salsa (the three pint jars on the right); the first 2012 batch (middle column & top jar of left column), and the 2012 Apple Annie's batch (it's the bottom-left quart; it's much redder in color than the other two batches). I pureed all the ingredients in the Apple Annie's batch, but the flavor didn't turn out quite as well as it did in the earlier batch--it's a little too mild. It may be because I had fewer types of peppers to work with (I had mostly jalapeno peppers in this batch, instead of Anaheim chiles, which I usually use). I think the main reason is that I used the fresh-picked tomatoes from Apple Annie's. They had a much stronger flavor than the store-bought tomatoes I used in the other batch, and so they overwhelmed the relatively fewer chiles I used. Nevertheless, it was still a pretty good batch; I am very excited at the way it all turned out this year!

I also canned about 13-15 quarts of pears shortly thereafter:

Apple Annie's doesn't sell many Bartlett pears, so we were lucky to get so many big, juicy ones. My family actually eats more canned pears than peaches, so we are going to be set for at least a year with all these pears!

Then, I decided to try something else I hadn't made for several years--apple butter! In the past, I've canned it in pint jars...but apple butter is so rich & flavorful we just didn't go through it that fast. So this year, I decided to splurge on some half-pint jars, so that the unused apple butter wouldn't languish in the fridge so long:

Such cute little jars! It was fun to fill them up. :)

I ended up with nine half-pints of apple butter, and they made the house smell so good I could have eaten a whole jar right then and there. I still have three empty half-pints left over. They will be perfect for when my jam-making compulsion acts up again.

So here's one more picture of my pantry, post-canning binge:

To sum up what's on each row (everything is listed left to right):

Top Row: Criterion applesauce; 2012 peaches; 2012 pears; 2012 apple butter; 2012 apple slices
Middle Row: 2011 apple pie filling and 2012 peaches; 2012 Criterion and Fuji applesauce; 2011 canned pineapple (I wish I could claim this, but it was a gift from a friend!) and canned apricots (from my grandfather's farm, which ceased to exist several years ago--I think I'd better use them up quick!), more 2011 apple pie filling, and all my jam (includes blueberry, strawberry-mango, blackberry-mango, raspberry-mango, blueberry-orange, and peach-mango, as well as an old can of apple butter. Whew!)
Bottom Row: 2011 pears; 2012 Fuji applesauce; a variety of peaches from 2010-12

That, plus the salsa on the opposite wall, amounts to a fair amount of work...with lots more applesauce to come in a month or two! This may be my most boring blog post ever, but I have enjoyed documenting my work. Hopefully this stuff will all fill a bunch of happy bellies in the months and years to come.