Adventures in Canning, Part Trois

I aided in the process of canning tomato sauce this weekend!! My best friend, Tricia, made several jars of tomato sauce that we were going to use on homemade pizzas but it was a little runny so we opted for some readymade Bertoli sauce. However, several jars await the winter. Tricia forgot to add lemon juice (for proper acidity) so she had to reseal the jars but all was not lost.

Canning tomatoes was a lot more extensive than canning jam. The tomato sauce needed to be on the stove for a few hours, there were more steps because there were tons more ingredients, but everything worked out. Huzzah!!

This past weekend was spent in Oklahoma with said friend. She is very adept at cooking wonderful foods so I will post pictures from her Flickr account of some of the foods we partook (is that a word?) of:

We grilled the buttered bread and it was wonderful!! Tricia's husband Matt grilled yummy yummy steaks and the bread was exceptionally wonderful grilled. It was from a local bakery!

These little jalapeno peppers had real big bite! They were stuffed (by me!) with a cream cheese and bacon mixture. We also stuffed some other kinds of peppers that were very light in spice which added a nice flavor without killing us. Matt ate a whole jalapeno and then promptly drank lots and lots of milk for the rest of the night. :)

I have to tell you: I LOVE THIS DRINK! It's called a caipirinha and it is made of Brazilian rum (called cachaca or Cachaca Khan as I like to call it), half a lime (sliced into quarters and crushed to get the juice out, a tablespoon of sugar, crushed ice, and add the rum! I always add water because I can't take the rum straight. I LOVE IT! It's like alcoholic limeade. I'm a huge limeade fan but this drink is to die for. Some info about the drink is available here.

We also had homemade pizzas with eggplant and caramalized onions on one and sausage on the other. Oh! and mousse:

I never have to worry about eating well at Tricia's house. It's always tasty and made with love. So cheers to you!

Adventures in Canning, part deux

NPR has a nice story on canning, complete with two recipes!
**sorry, needed to clean that up a bit, eh??**
This weekend, my best friend and I are going to can tomatoes. Wish us luck!

Adventures in Canning

This Sunday marked my first successful adventure in canning!!! My husband and I found some wild Mustang grapevines along our street. We gathered a bakery box full and took them back home (he later went back and filled a five gallon bucket full for wine-making).

I have never canned anything in my life so we did some Internet searching (they have the Internet on computers now??) and found a Mustang grape jam recipe.

First: let's meet the grapes. Mustang grapes are very, very acidic, so acidic that if you handle the grapes and get the juice on your skin, you start to itch. The skins are very bitter but the fruit inside is tart and palatable. The seeds are large, like a smaller version of lemon seeds. You can eat the grapes off the vine but I recommend squeezing out the fruit and eating that, spitting out the seeds. We had a vine on our fence when I was growing up in Joshua but we rarely ate them. Sometimes, if we did eat them, our mouths, lips and throat would itch! Not fun. :)

So I began the canning process by removing the skins, leaves, and stems. Then I put the grapes in a hand "grinder/sifter": something with holes and a crank so I could turn the grapes to get the juice out. I put the grapes in the blender to chop them and the seeds up. Next you cook the pureed grapes with pectin and a sweetener. At first, I was opposed to any sweetener but the Mustangs are so tart, they needed something. Honey was the alternative that we chose because it just didn't seem right to put in sugar or Splenda.

The canning process involved lots of sterilizing the jars, then warming them up, then putting the cooked mixture into the jars, then sealing them. I think the sealing process is by far the most important process. If something goes wrong, you will get bacteria into your jam or you will have the potential for getting bacteria into the jam. The seal should be tight enough that if you press on the top of the lid, nothing should pop back at you.

For two weeks, the jam jars sat in a cabinet, protected from light and other annoyances. And then: jam! I made homemade biscuits Sunday morning for our jam debut. Well.....the biscuits were disgusting (note: shortening is gross) so I thought the jam was tainted. After more biscuit testing, I determined it was not the jam. The jam made it's workplace debut on Monday morning.

It is tart but palatable. The seeds did not get chopped up small enough to not have a noticeable crunch but it's like eating crunchy peanut butter...except that it's jam. People at work were very kind and said that the jam was good.

Next time I will try straining the seeds out so we don't get the crunchiness. But, overall, I said it was quite a success and I will happily do it again!