More canning

 



Ketchup, quince and sauce prep



Jewel and I embarked on another canning extravaganza on Sunday.  The plan for this go round was to stick to tomatoes and just two recipes.  You know what they say about the best laid plans... and, in our case, they were set aside when our friend Susan gave us seven pounds of quince and 4 pounds of Asian pears.  We revised and decided to go for four recipes - quince marmalade, pear butter, ketchup and tomato sauce. 

We had done quite a bit of the produce procurement ahead of time.  We got 50 pounds of tomatoes from a local farm, 20 pounds in free discards from New Seasons courtesy of Isaac, 20 pounds from our CSA and another ten or so from Michelle's garden.  Jewel arrived at my house around 6 am on Sunday and we spent a few minutes double checking recipes and doing some preliminary organizing.  Then, we headed to the Lakeridge High School track with Onya to get in our 'formal' workouts for the day.  We make a quick trip to St. Honore for some pain au chocolate and Chai tea lattes so that we'd be properly fueled for the long day ahead.  From there, we swung by New Seasons to get the remaining ingredients, snacks and a couple of cases of beer.  It turns out that cold beers are a necessity when spending an entire day canning...



Once home, we set Ty to work quartering, coring and seeding those 100 pounds of tomatoes.  Oh, but first, he had to dice 12 onions and 5 heads of garlic for us.  Turns out that swim goggles come in quite handy when processing that quantity of onions (photo to follow)!!  Ty was such a trooper and the day went much, much smoother thanks to his hours of hard work. 





Quince, two batches of ketchup and Ty seeding



Our first recipe to hit the stove top was the quince marmalade.  While that was going, we also started the first batches of ketchup.  The quince came out well although it didn't attain the pink color noted in the recipe.  The first batch of anything is a learning experience so that's not all that surprising.  The ketchup takes a couple of hours and we were able to also make a batch of pear butter while we were working on the FOUR batches of ketchup. 



Three batches of sauce and one of quince marmalade



Around the end of the ketchup, we had Ty set up the propane tank and burner outside for all the processing and we managed to get all four burners on the stove going with various stages of tomato recipes!  It was a beautiful sight indeed.  Once the ketchup was done, we started in with what ended up being six batches of tomato sauce.  We finished the night with a second batch of quince marmalade since we had to wait for Isaac to arrive with more sugar (oops - my bad!).  The second batch cooked much longer because we were backed up from the sauce having to process for 35 minutes - but this time we got to the promised pink color! 





MONSTER bin of compost!



I haven't yet counted how many jars of each recipe we ended up with...  but I will soon and I'll post that too.  I know that I'm going to have to clear out another shelf in my pantry to store our bounty.  Jewel and I are a pretty fierce canning team - working well together and happy to jump in to help each other at any step along the way.  I'm really looking forward to apple canning day in a couple of weeks! 





This is the final haul - sauce in pints and quince, pear and ketchup in half-pints