Ok...a half a bushel of tomatoes made just under seven quarts of tomato sauce. Six quarts of strawberries made just under four pints of strawberry jam and three quarts of berries in juice. But cucumbers, oh my...the recipe said eight pounds would make seven pints of cucumbers. I weighed out eight pounds and got thirteen pints of pickles. I had to do a double batch of the pickling juice. On top of that it, taking out the eight pounds of cucumbers barely made a dent in the basket of cucumbers. I'm going to be canning quarts of cucumbers for days!!!! Argh! Should hope they taste good!
DOES ANYONE KNOW IF I'M DOING SOMETHING WRONG? This is the first time I've ever attempted this. The good news is I guess I'll end up using up the quart jars covering my counters.
I'm off to the airport to pick up my Mom in an hour. She's agreed to stay here tonight. I am so glad. It'll be good to have her here and be able to help her. Then we'll head back to the airport in the morning to pick up Sweetheart!!!! I'm so glad. I've missed everyone. Time to check the cucumbers...
4 comments:
Kimberly: You are bring back memories galore - when I was your age I canned a lot! You do not have to use a pressure cooker for acid based items- just water bath if you like and my mom always told me not to do the tomatoes as long as they said because they were mushier.
Bernideen
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Oh the joys of canning I have't done that in a long while, I can't help you but I do remember that nothing seemed to add up just like you........... go figure.
Diane
Grrr. I had a lovely comment all typed out and my computer ate it.
Anyway, to try again. Pickles make great gifts, I'm always giving away extra pickles and jam(if your strawberry bombed it would be lovely on icecream...). What kind are you making? I have a great recipe for zesty dill, that is super easy.
As far as the massive amounts of pickles, I feel your pain. I just go ahead with the recipe as its written, since altering the recipes can be disasterous/dangerous. I think you get less of things like tomato sauce or jam, because your mashing you produce, cooking it down, and reducing the volumn, but with something like pickles, you are cutting them up and creating more volumn so to speak. I canned my first batch of beans yesterday, and 12 cups of cut green beans was supposed to give me 6 finished pints, I got 7.
In the last 3-4 weeks I've put up 68 jars of jams to soups, and a little of everything in between. Tommorrow I'm doing corn and black bean salsa, fruit cocktail, and peach,pear and lime preserves.
As a 12 year canning veteran I see the benefits of canning bees to take away some of the tediouseness of doing it alone!
Have fun!
I have no idea what's going on (unlike you, I'm still afraid of pressure canning), but I've found the posts on how to do food preservation stuff at this blog: http://www.sharonastyk.com, to be interesting. Here's what she said on how to do pressure canning:
http://sharonastyk.com/2008/07/24/pressure-canning-101/
On another kitchen topic, it sounds like you have both zucchini and basil in your garden. I am making these
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2008/07/19/gardening-basics-what-to-do-with-all-your-zucchini/
Zucchini-Basil Muffins for supper tonight. We'll see how this turns out.
And I'm sorry (as you said in your previous post) about the stinky summer your family is having.
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