House Guests Gone, Now for Canning!

Now that my house guests have come and gone, it's back to cooking and blogging. Today's topic: canning. I'm going to be doing a good bit of canning over the next two months, so now's a good time to start talking about what's being planned. First of all, I can because I love knowing that I have good, homemade, often homegrown or locally grown food in my pantry. I also love that I save loads of money doing this and rarely need to worry about food recalls!

Friday we celebrated Christmas with the kids' grandparents who never get to see them at the holiday, so we had a turkey dinner with all the trimmings. Not one to let anything go to waste, I of course made turkey stock from the carcass by combining the carcass, a bag of celery ends, onion peels, and garlic peels from the freezer, and enough fresh, cold water to cover in my 18 qt roaster oven (like a huge crockpot). Turn to 400 for a couple hours to get things going, then turn down to 250 and simmer from Friday evening until after lunch on Saturday. Turn it off, let it cool a little, then use a slotted spoon to scoop out most of the solids and put them into a bowl to discard. Finally, scoop or pour stock through a colander and into Rubbermaid containers to get the last of the solids. Then all of it (three containers!) went into the fridge for a chill. Tomorrow, I will pull them from the fridge, scrape off the fat which has floated to the top and congealed, then heat it again in my large crockpot and pressure can my turkey stock - I should probably get 10 pint jars! It is a lovely deep golden brown color and so fragrant that I can hardly keep from dreaming of making turkey noodle soup! You can certainly do this and freeze in portion sizes that are good for you, but I love the convenience of having it canned and have the ability to do it, so I choose to pressure can it instead.

My wild chokecherries that grow between a couple of my pastures are ripening and should be ready in a couple weeks. I'm making plans on what to do with them since I've never had chokecherry anything and this is a grand experiment!

Another grand experiment: corn is in and prices are falling on locally grown corn, so I'm going to be hitting up friends for their corn cobs when they are freezing cut corn kernels. My plan: make corn cob jelly and corn stock. I know, you are thinking I am incredibly odd, but the corn cob jelly is supposed to have a delicate honey-like flavor which sounds so very nice, and the corn stock is supposed to be a wonderful addition to things like chicken corn soup, corn chowder, vegetable soup, herbed rice, and anything else that can use a light, slightly sweet, slightly corn-flavored broth. I'm game to try it with something that otherwise will be tossed on the compost pile!

Ripening soon: wild plums to make into wild plum jam and pears to make into all sorts of things! The tomatoes are starting to ripen too. I've heard that I can core my tomatoes and put them in the freezer as they ripen to wait to can them until I have enough for a batch of salsa or stewed tomatoes or whatever, and an extra bonus besides "holding" my tomatoes safely is that when they thaw, the skins slip right off so that I don't have to blanche the tomatoes to peel them. Fantastic! Hmmmmm, my thoughts are now wandering towards salsa, stewed tomatoes, diced tomatoes, and homemade barbeque sauce. I'm also thinking about trying a trick I heard for a use for the tomato skins - put all the tomato skins and seeds into a discard bowl and then spread them on dehydrator trays (the kind used for fruit leather, not the open ones!) and dry. When dry, put through the food processor and make a tomato powder which can be used to thicken soups and stews or as a seasoning. Yippee, another food otherwise destined for the compost pile leaps back into my kitchen!

Okay, enough about canning. Stay tuned for school lunch plans, because school starts on September 1!