Such a great feeling

We had a busy and productive weekend.  Saturday had us heading up to some friend's home to visit a gun store and do some canning.  Found a nice little .22 that fits my hand.  And before everyone starts telling me .22's are useless, my options in handguns are very limited due to my short, stubby fingers.  There are few handguns made that I can reach the trigger on.  Thank you to my Dutch ancestors for that.  So anyway, after the gun shop and some lunch we swung by the farmer's market and picked up 2 bushels of tomatoes.  

The plan was to can all of them at her place but we were just a little late getting started with the whole process so we ended up just canning her bushel.  She ended up with 7 lovely quarts of tomatoes.

Sunday Don and I started out making mulberry jam.  We discovered this spring that there's a couple mulberry trees that overhang the property and one drops tons of red mulberries.  We think the other tree is white mulberry.  Once the berries started to drop Don spread out a tarp under the tree so we could collect some.....it was an intense battle with the birds.  I'd cleaned them and stuck them in the freezer until we were ready to can them.  I was a little nervous since my only other attempt at making jelly had been a total fail.  You know those gel candles you can buy?  That's what the consistency of my first attempt at jelly was like.  Smelt good though!

Anyway, I started cooking up the jam using a recipe I found on the internet.  Can you believe the Ball book doesn't have a recipe for mulberry jam??  It looked good and tasted like jam so I'm hoping when we open a jar to try it won't require a wick and lighter to use.  

Once the jam was done....I just love the sound of popping canning lids....we started blanching the tomatoes.  I felt a bit ghoulish peeling the skins off!  We decided the best use for us would be to quarter them and can them in pints.  That's more the amount we use for cooking stuff.  They were sure pretty cooking up in the pot.

The canning went smoothly even though it was only the third time I'd ever pressure canned.  We are now the proud parents of 14 pints of freshly canned tomatoes.

In a couple weeks I think we're going to go pick green beans to can.  Then in the fall we're going to whip up some apple butter.  Also getting ready to start firing up the dehydrator to test out with some vegetables.


I really do love canning.  There's something extremely relaxing and satisfying about the whole process.