Since last we talked about my canning adventures, I’ve continued in a couple of different batches to can:
3 qts sweet pickled green tomatoes
4 qts sour pickled green tomatoes
9 pints green tomato chutney
9 pints green tomato salsa
4 pints green tomato jelly
4 pints green tomato butter
9 pints blackberries in light syrup
3 pints blackberry jam
3 1/2 pints blackberry chipotle jam
My pantry is brimming, and most of it is with food I won’t exactly turn to every single day, but it’s all been a really fabulous learning experience.
My whole goal in taking on this canning project was to make heaps and heaps of homemade marinara sauce. I haven’t had a spare second to get back out to the community garden and see if the tomatoes are ripe, but I fear I may have missed my window for free tomatoes.
The week before my big conference, I got a message that the tomatoes were going to be plowed under. So I dropped everything and raced out there to claim what I could, only to discover that all the tomatoes were green. Since I was already out there, I picked a basket of green tomatoes and got to work on them. Green tomatoes aren’t exactly easy to find in the grocery store, so I had no idea how many great things you could make with them. Including a salsa that substitutes them for tomatillos, and a sweet jelly with just a hint of basil aftertaste. Pickled tomatoes are also not something I ever would have tried on my own, but they are really yummy.
A few weeks before that I went out to a spot in town where there are some blackberry bushes along the road. I was hoping to pick gallons and gallons of them, but my helpers weren’t exactly helpful. The power went out to the car’s cigarette lighter, so Atti was left without an Elmo DVD to entertain him, and Bear was scared off by enormous spider webs. I spent a couple of hours getting torn up by blackberry brambles and grumbling about being the Little Red Hen, before going home for frozen lemonade.
Blackberries are my very favorite and they remind me of my childhood in Washington where blackberries grow wild and we would walk down the hill to collect bowls full of sun-warmed berries to turn into pie. I’m really excited about the blackberry chipotle jam – which ended up kind of being my own recipe – and I plan on pouring it over ham or pork to use as a glaze.
Hopefully I’ll come across a great deal on ripe tomatoes in the next few weeks and I can put all my practicing to work filling my shelves with homemade marinara sauce so I can always have an easy go-to meal on hand.