I have been busy freezing and canning vegetables from our garden and tons of tomatoes a friend gave me. I wanted to share the recipes I used. I'm NOT an expert canner by any means. I was actually very intimated and overwhelmed when I started. Much to my surprise though every single jar I canned, sealed! I just bought a ton of peaches from the farmers market and I'm planning to can/freeze those in the next few days. Other things I froze were shredded zucchini (for zucchini bread), green peppers, green beans, collard greens (not sure for what yet) and kale (for smoothies and soups).
Basically this week, my house was neglected b/c free time was spent trying to get this stuff done!
Here are the websites I used for canning...I just looked through a bunch on line and decided on these for no real reason other than they had easy steps/pictures to follow!
beingfrugalbychoice.blogspot.com (canning diced tomatoes)
lifeingraceblog.com (salsa recipe)
pickyourown.org (referenced this site for freezing the things mentioned above as well as for canning tomato sauce and general canning protocol)
I also made a marinara sauce in the crock pot using a recipe our friends gave us. They have a blog that is basically their favorite recipes. I'm sure they will be putting this marinara sauce recipe up soon. They are really good cooks too by the way! Check out their blog!!!
Anyone else canning/freezing stuff? also, any good recipe that uses collard greens????
Hey, I've been canning tomatoes too! Only we don't have a garden, so I get them from a neighbor who sells his extras. Maybe you know this, but here's a tip I picked up ... if you have tomato "extras" like the core, the peel, or the blossom end as scraps that you don't use in canning, you can boil those down with a little bit of water, strain them in a food mill, and you get a good tomato sauce (may have to boil it down to thicken it up a bit). When I canned tomatoes, I started with 20 pounds of tomatoes, and ended up with a couple pounds of "scraps" ... all the scraps came to about 2 cups of sauce, which was pretty cool. I was just excited to learn that I could use every part of the tomato :)
ReplyDeleteWow! Good to know! I need to get some canning equipment...like food mill and maybe an actual canning pot. I'm just using the biggest pot I have for now.
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