Another batch of tomato jam last night
The garden has exploded! The dining room table has been filled to groaning with the various harvests., probably the best garden season for us in the last 3 decades!! A lot of canning has happened, Stay tuned.
Gorgeous! My congrats, followed by a big dose of tomato envy.
We’re just now getting our first garden tomatoes due to a particularly cold spring and summer. The good news is it’s looking like a long, dry fall, which bodes well for the late-season tomato grower.
Wow, when do you usually get your tomato glut ?
In a good year, we’ll start picking in July. This year was truly an anomoly (and not in a good way. ). I’m just happy they’ve pulled through this long - I picked a bundle for ripening on the counter today (supposed to rain tonight). Nothing as gorgeous as @Lambchop53’s vine-ripened haul, but still hoping to can a bit of sauce this year.
Wow, so much later. I’ve seen on Reddit some ppl pulling their plants up without having harvested anything.
Bummer! It was going to be hit-or-miss here, depending on fall weather, but I’m happy to report it looks like we lucked out! Same can be said for peppers. I hadn’t a hope for long while there, but it looks like we’ll get 'em.
Possible Snooze Alert
Using this space as a canning journal of sorts, so might get boring. We’ve been so busy in the kitchen ever since June, but the results have been most gratifying! Just kind of burnt out with it all at this point. Many happy recipients though.
Started out with 2 or 3 double batches of jam from local strawberries - Picha Farms and the most beautiful, flavorful strawberries ever. These turned out very well.
Next project, the raspberries started up, and the green gage plums too, so it was on to a couple batches of raspberry plum jam, which is a favorite. Also made some pure raspberry jam, a couple of batches if I remember correctly.
Blackberries followed, and these were picked at a friend’s house, thus a good supply of seedless blackberry jam.
I’d been craving apricots, so I ordered some from my green market, and got some from both California and Eastern Washington. I do prefer the semi-local fruit. So quite a few apricot jams - a couple double batches of each.
A local friend gave us a bunch of delicious peaches from her tree, so that wound up as peach-raspberry jam, and a batch of canned peach sauce for Bellinis or ice cream. Ate a bunch fresh & made a memorable peach ricotta cake with browned butter streusel. So good.
Canned a batch of pickled beets, some sliced & some julienned. Put some hard boiled eggs in the leftover brine.
On to the never ending tomatoes - yikes! A batch of tomato jam from FIJ, much vaunted. Delicious, but am thankful I reduced the sugar by a cup or more. Our tomatoes seem sweeter this year. Then on to salsa, pizza sauce, quarts of spicy tomato vegetable juice, and an old resurrected Mexican Hot Sauce recipe from the original Moosewood Cookbook. Thoroughly delicious. Can’t think of anything else at the moment, but there are a couple more projects in the near future. Looking for a recipe for a chile infused vinegar, like Tabasco, but different peppers. Anyone have a tried & true? Our chiles are going crazy too.
It all sounds so terrific and worthwhile - you are my hero!
Awww thanks! Hope this isn’t a fluke this year, and we can have similar success next season too.
Made autumn fruit jam last week-end: plums, pears and apples. And a “mixed fruit” chutney that uses the same fruit: recipe is from this cookbook. I actually cut the sugar in half: it seemed like way too much to me..
Jam was very pretty but my phone is acting up so I can’t share!
We came back from vacation to find one our latent blueberry bushes had finally done it’s thing. These were late season berries (nowhere near as good as peak-season berries), but good enough for making syrup. I followed this formula, although cut the sugar back by 33%. I had 8 cups of berries, and got about 3.5 half-pints of syrup for our pancakes. The whole process took about an hour (not including berry picking).
Had some ripe pears so i made pear jam with chopped uncrystalized ginger thrown in. Did that ever add a zing. Just 1 jar but will make more
Salted brown sugar peach jam from Preserving by the Pint.. very good use of some peaches that were a bit long in the tooth.
Shockingly I have never made this recipe. I think I will change that.
Continuing on with the glut of garden tomatoes, I canned 8 pints and 1/2 pint of diced tomatoes with Hatch green chiles and a couple of serranos and jalapeños added to the mix. The Hatch chiles were purchased, the others grown in the garden. All the chiles were charred on the gas grill. Peeling and seeding them took longer than getting the tomatoes ready. Added some homemade tomato puree in with the batch. I think this might be the last canning project for the year, but will have to see.
The bottom picture is the Moosewood Mexican hot sauce. It’s possible I’ll forage some huckleberries from the backyard for syrup or jelly. Oh and there might be some Concord grapes to process.
Lovely.
Thanks!
Where do you find those adorable labels?
I ordered them from Amazon a few years ago - they came in a roll of about 500 & I am almost out. I’ve re-ordered something similar, will post a pic soon.