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August 19th, 2007
I haven’t canned since my first marriage and that was during what my mom calls my “earth mother phase.”
I am SO not a domestic type person. I don’t clean well, I’m horribly unorganized and I really don’t like to cook. I *can* cook a few things and I can follow a recipe, so I do it sometimes. I like it better when DH cooks, because he’s Italian and makes really good stuff. I like to make him scream with “When I was growing up, Italian food meant a can of Chef Boy Ardee!”
But I LOVE to can. I have no idea why; there’s just something about seed to plant to garden to fruit to Ball jar to shelf that makes me feel self sufficient. And since I grew up on home-canned foods, there’s no better taste than home-canned tomatoes, pickles and peaches. I’m not doing peaches because I no longer live near orchards that are owned by distant relatives (who let you run around and pick up overripe peaches to use for pickled peaches and jams).
I only did three quarts and a pint (cold pack, easy stuff, just peel and core the tomatoes, add some salt and lemon juice, pack the sterilized jars and process in a water bath), but tomorrow plan to do more. Obviously the tomatoes are doing well this year, despite the squirrel who chomped several.
Those Black Krims looked kind of icky in the jar. Those are delicious tomatoes, but there’s definitely an ick factor when you see them. When ripe, they look kind of rotten due to the black. And they go soft QUICKLY.
Because of my good fortune in growing grape tomatoes from seed this year (first time ever I’ve been able to grow tomatoes from seed, but I hadn’t tried since I got my basement grow-light setup), I’m going to try several bizarre tomatoes next year. Totally Tomatoes (totallytomatoes.com) has so many kinds, plus lots of peppers. I also love peppers (sweet ones only…I’m a Midwesterner, we don’t do hot).
This is just fabulous.
Possibly Related PostsThis entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Organic Gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.