Labor Day Weekend

Over Labor Day Weekend, I was planning on spending just Friday canning tomatoes but things changed and I spend the entire weekend preserving food. I started by collecting the last of my 2009 whole canned tomatoes and reprocessing them into 6 quarts of tomato juice. Then I took 10 quarts from the 2010 whole canned tomatoes, made vegetable juice from them for a total of 8 quarts. On Saturday at the Dodgeville Farmer’s Market I brought large chili pepper for a Canned Tomato Salsa recipe I found on Simply Recipes web site. The recipe says it makes about 5 pints but I got 13 ½-pint jars of canned salsa. The previous weekend I tried Simply Recipes Tomatillo Salsa Verde and it was great. I used my new pressure cooker to can this salsa.

Once I finished with the juice and salsa, I started roasting tomatoes in the broiler, removing the skins and placing them in quarts jars to can. I roasted both paste and regular tomatoes and ended up with 7 quarts of each type. I still had some tomatoes left some I roasted them up and made “Hot and Spicy Chili Sauce” to use on hamburgers and sausages. This gave me 15 ½-pint of chili for my pantry. Then I pulled the last of the 2009 strawberry and rhubarb from my freezer and made jam for a total 3 pints of strawberry and 12 pints of strawberry rhubarb jam.

In between all the canning I did find sometime on Labor Day to wash the basement floor and apply hydraulic cement on possible leaks in the floor. Next Monday I can start painting that section of the floor.

I still want to roast another 5 quarts each of the paste and regular tomatoes before I call it an end to the canning season.  I am still picking bean, broccoli, zucchini, eggplant, and peppers and freezing them.  My winter squashes are dying off and soon will be ready storage in my basement pantry.  The gardening season may last until the end of the month if I am lucky and the weather remains mild.