Canning stuff....

Last week I canned 6 quarts of Annie's salsa. Very tasty! We've gone through one quart already....

I just got back from the grocery store where they had jalapeño peppers on sale for 2 lbs for a buck, not limit. I bought 4 lbs. Now I'm looking for a canning recipe to my liking. I will put the jalapeños up in pint size jars.

Somewhere along my ancestry line must be a Mexican...

A dear couple we know are originally from Cuba having immigrated here as teens following Castro's taking over the country. I just assumed they liked things hot and spicy. After all Cuba is located just east of Cancun Mexico and just north of Jamaica.... They won't eat my salsa....too hot... Anytime we make salsa that they will be eating we have to make what we call wimpo salsa....

My foster mom loved salt. She would make a potato salad that was too salty. While it was being passed around the table she would always say it needed more salt as she passed around the salt shaker..... I think her taste buds were dead.....

What nationality are you Mikey.........maybe it's all in your genes?

American thru&thru.... I was raised in foster homes and don't know much about my roots. My father was from the Appalachians area and just last night my wife was doing some genealogy and found my mother's birth certificate on-line. Her birth certificate said her mom was from Denmark.

My foster parents owned some land in the foothills and had it planted with a hundred or more fruit trees, mostly peaches. Due to the abundance of free fruit my wife used to do some canning. Eventually the property was sold and she got rid of all her canning stuff. Then I retired and got interested in canning and I ended up buying more canning stuff.... I really enjoy the Annie's Salsa that I can. In fact I piled it on my scrambled eggs this morning. Great stuff!.........and not too salty....

Cool Chools wrote:Where I grew up in South St. Louis, we had a peach tree in our back yard. Some years, the peaches would reach the size of a soft ball, no kidding. We would set up a stand down on the corner and, instead of lemonade, we'd sell the peaches.

There is NOTHING like a fresh, truely ripe off the tree, still warm, juicy PEACH. Just about my favorite fruit, those tree-ripened peaches.

I grow peaches in my back yard. You're right, there is nothing like a peach right off the tree!

The only advice I can give you about canning japalenos is NOT to boil them in vinegar before putting them in the canning jars. My brother decided he wanted to do some. Filled a pot with the peppers, a few chopped up carrots and onions. He sat them on the stove and turned the heat up high. Soon everyone in the house was outside LOL It took all day to air out the house.

I think if you put the peppers in jars with a few slices of onion and carrot, maybe a teaspoon or less of oil and a pinch of salt, maybe a garlic clove and then either pressure canned or a water bath they might be almost like the canned ones we buy from Mexico. It would be worth a try. I've done cayenne and banana peppers in a waterbath and they came out great. Timing will be the key tho. Too long and they turn mushy.

I put up 7 pints of jalapeños. I chopped up some onions, threw in some garlic cloves, peppercorns and salt. I stuffed them into jars and poured some boiled cider vinegar over them. They now have to sit for a few weeks before I will know if I succeeded.

I have made them before without boiling the vinegar nor did I use a water bath. The old recipe called for using 100% red wine vinegar and then two tablespoons of olive oil on top to seal out the air. The high acid content and the oil on top was enough to preserve them without refrigeration. They were very tasty and I look forward to seeing how my current batch compares....

How did you seal the jars? I think that would be ok for a jar or 2 that you keep in the fridge but would be worried about long term storage.

The jars had the screw-on lids but the only sealing to keep air out was the 2 tablespoons of olive oil floating on top. Once we started using a jar we kept it in the fridge.

We found the recipe in a Mexican cookbook and they said that was how they learned to preserve them in Mexico. I made sevaral jars of them 2-3 years ago and recently used up the last jar. The vinegar used was not diluted with water and I guess it, coupled with the oil on the surface, was enough to prevent botulism.

Having since read more about canning I became concerned about botulism and even though these were apparently safe, the recipe was not an approved method of preserving and so I chose not to use it but instead went with an approved recipe that required the water bath. I just hope they taste as good....

I do lots of jellies and figs. I've noticed the instructions in SureJel now says to do everything with a water bath and not the old method of sterlizing the jars, filling, screw the top on, turn it upside down for 5 minutes then back up and let cool. I still use this method and it hasn't killed us yet.

Botulism scares the living peewaddle out of me. A friend's dad got it from some homemade salsa. He survived but was one very sick man for a while.

I too am a little leery of canning. I have only made pickled green tomatoes and with all the acid in the vinegar and green tomatoes it is relatively safe. I like to blanch and freeze our harvest from the garden and this year wasn't a good tomato year for us.

I freeze tomatoes. Dip them in boiling water then into cold and slip the skins. Chop and put in pint and quart size ziplock bags. Add a little of the juice too. I usually buy about 30 pounds of tomatoes each summer and they last us all year. Tomatoes this past year were terrible with the drought and then flooding rains so I don't have any in the freezer for this winter.

We do our tomatoes the same way, boil till skin slips then freeze. This year the harvest was so small that all we got was enough to make one batch of spaghetti sauce and nothing in the freezer