Back in business

There will be 2 posts from me today...but first, I want to talk about the big project of the day.  Canning.  I have canned jam before, but nothing else and it was time to try.  I warmed up by making up a little plum jam, however.  I had to.  Little rascals that they are, they just jumped right into my cart.  Really.  They did.  So we showed them.  Ami N and I cut them up and made a delightful jam. 

The color is so, so beautiful.  Hooray for jam. 

It was time to get serious.  Started a batch of applesauce in the crockpot, and started in on the tomatoes.  Ami J and I bought a few different varieties and following the directions of my current inspiration, Mrs. Wheelbarrow, we set out on our first tomato adventure.  Its really quite easy-just time consuming-but if you have a team (hooray for sisters!), you can get a pretty good system down and move the process along.  I womanned the stove, boiling the tomatoes for a minute or so to crack the skin, then dumped them in the Ami N's ice bath, she pulled the skins off, and passed them off to Ami J for chopping. Once that was done, back into the pot they go for a few minutes...to a rolling boil for 5 minutes or so.  We were just canning them as plain tomatoes, so they can be used as anything.  Cooked up, ladled into jars and into the water bath they went.  This is the part of canning I had never done.  We don't water bath our jam-we use the inversion method, which has always worked just fine.  8 jars of tomatoes required 2 pots of water and I (oops) flooded the pilot light on one side of my stove, so we had to cram both pots on one side of the stove.

45 minutes later...its so pretty, isn't it?  I also ended up canning 1 jar of applesauce.  I have to admit it was a little disappointing...I got one and a half quart jars from the giant pile of apples that was crammed in my crockpot.  They cook down a lot.  Sigh.  I gave the half jar to Ami J, who is making apple butter downstairs.  She added it to her mix.  The good news is that this morning, she has a big pot of applesauce cooking so we will can it up later.  I'll post pics.  Its very pretty too. 

Now, stay tuned for my next post.  I have a project that I am starting...I totally stole the idea, but I have adapted it a bit for my life, and I am really excited about it.