Canning Overload!

Yesterday I had both kiddos out of the way for the entire day. I canned 6 pints of zucchini pickles, 7 pints of “Fireballs” (spicy green cherry tomatoes), 7 1/2 pints of peach jam. I also froze 5 8oz freezer jars of the jam, started my apple butter and applesauce.

(I’ll post some pictures later)

No, I’m not super woman (although I was VERY busy). I use a sort of staged method for my canning. This is something that I’ve never read about anywhere, although I’m sure that I’m not the first person to come up with this idea.

Let me explain.

As far as I could tell, there was no need to do all the steps for making preserves and pickles on the same day. So I do the prep work when I have time-and then can on another day (keeping the prepped items properly/safely stored of course)

So about a week ago I sliced the zucchini & onions, brined them for an hour, rinsed, then mixed up the pickling solution, put it all together in my largest crockpot liner (instead of a pot) and put it out in my second fridge in the garage. I figured that they would be fine like this, since the recipe is one that you can make either freezer/refrigerator pickles or canned pickles. Yesterday I sterilized and heated the jars, poured the pickles into a big pot, brought it up to temp and boiled for 10 min (which was the one step in the original recipe I hadn’t done yet) then canned the hot pickles in the hot jars.

2 days ago I had pricked all the tiny green tomatoes with a clean pin and then ziplocked them in the fridge. While the zucchini pickles were canning I followed the rest of that recipe-packing the raw tomatoes into room temp jars, adding a clove of garlic, dill, a sprig of lovage (instead of celery), and a couple of slices of hot pepper. Then I boiled the brine, and when the zucchini came out of the pot to cool, I was able to pour the brine into the Fireball jars, seal and process. Don’t forget that the time to can starts when the water comes back up to a boil-that took a while in this case because the tomatoes and jars were room temp and cooled off the water.

Then while that was going I dealt with the peaches. Last fall I had bought, peeled and chopped 10 cups of peaches, then ziplocked them and tossed them in my deep freeze. The intention was to make peach butter in a month or so. Well, that never happened. My kiddos are on a jelly kick right now, so I decided to make the peaches into preserves.

I had taken the peaches out of the freezer first thing in the morning, then when they were partially defrosted I was able to break up the block o fruit and stick it in a bowl in the microwave. When my big pot was freed up (yes, I washed it about 5 times yesterday) I tossed them in, heated them up, added the sugar and pectin as stated on the package and jarred, sealed and processed them. By that time I was a bit tired of the whole deal, so I canned 7 jelly jars, and the rest went into freezer containers.

Oh, and early on in the morning in between other things I used my apple corer/slicer thing to prepare a bunch of apples-about 16 cups roughly chopped. Then I threw them into my small crockpot with the apple juice and sugar for the apple butter recipe and plugged it in-in the bathroom. Hey-I was short on counter space and this puppy has to cook for 12 hours or so. Oh, and unlike every other crockpot recipe you’ve ever used, you want the water to evaporate on this one, so leave the top cracked.

Lastly, after all the canning was done, I had straightened up and picked up the kids, I cored/sliced a whole canning pot full of apples while watching a movie with the kiddos. Then I steamed them till soft on the stove and ran them through the food mill after the kids went to bed.

So I still have to can apple butter and apple sauce-but I’ll do all those on Sunday afternoon.

What is the benefit to all this? For me the actual CANNING part, with lots of boiling water etc seems to be the most difficult part of canning. Well, it isn’t actually difficult, it is just time consuming and messy. So if I can just heat up the pot once and use it for a bunch of different things, well, I’m much more likely to actually DO it.

And as far as partially preparing other things, I have bags and bags of tomatoes in the freezer. When I’m ready to process those the skins should just peel right off, and a lot of the water will already have drained out of them, which should reduce the time involved in reducing the sauce down.

NOTE: Make sure you keep everything safe! You have to stay within your own personal comfort level on this one, keeping things hot or cold appropriately to prevent bacteria from growing.