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My Foray into Canning

I'm a converted city chick...or would it be converted country chick? Well, whatevah...point is, I live in the country and I love it! But I grew up "in town"...hence, "the conversion".

We had a bountiful garden...at least in my eyes! We had tomato plants dripping with red fruit, and Mr. Wonderful said, "Let's can it!"

Well...lemme tell ya 'bout canning.

I figure it's like knitting...no one hates knitting but still does it to put clothes on their back (anymore), right?

Yeah, well, I figure no one hates canning but still does it to put food on their table.

So, our tomatoes that we had "comin' out of the wazoo"...after blanching, cooling, peeling, seeding, quartering...we've got like...a jar. (And, I found out that someone we knew planted 120 tomato plants...we had 6...so much for that "wazoo"!)

27 hours after we started (ok, so maybe I'm exaggerating) we've got enough for one meal. Maybe. If we're lucky.

Seriously? Isn't time money? I told my hubby, "This one jar of 'tomato something' is worth like, a hundred bucks at this point, dontchathink?"

Sheesh, I can go to the store, buy myself a nice jar of Prego, come home and whip up a tasty batch of spaghetti in less time and for less money than our one jar of "tomato surprise".

Bugger.

And to think I could've continued on my quest to find a rockin' pair of jeans...or some stylin' Naughty Monkey's.

It's official...I'm not a canner.

Comments

  1. **giggles**

    My sister-friend in Ohio makes homemade everything, including tomato things like salsa and spaghetti sauce... and her spaghetti sauce with those Amish Ohio tomatoes is un.believe.able. Seriously. I'd spend all day if the results were that good. Problem is, mine would probably not turn out as good.

    She taught me to make pickles this summer, I made beets as well. It wasn't too time consuming, and Jillian and I made an activity of it, it wasn't too bad. They tasted good too!

    What I can't do, for the life of me, is grow vegetables. Flowers, yes, vegetables, uhm, not so much.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You know what I used to do to preserve my tomatoes when I didn't plant or harvest enough to actually can?

    Make them directly into spaghetti sauce or chili and freeze it in 1 gal. baggies. It's no less prep work up front and you actually have a meal on the other end. You can feel good about eating your summer bounty in the winter, but not spend all day canning!

    That being said, we can all sorts of stuff, including spaghetti sauce. We did an 18 qt roaster full, all with produce from our own plants (we had 7 by the way) and will be enjoying spaghetti from our own garden all winter.

    Just thought I would share! Good for you trying, though!

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is true with so many things- just too much effort and expense! I find this with home-made pizza versus a take-n-bake pizza- it costs more and is a pain if you make your own crust!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ha! Love it! We had 5 plants, and what we thought was a bounty too! We tried our hat at salsa this year. We got 6 jars- hopefully a new post coming up soon.

    ReplyDelete

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