Canning Fanatic

At the beginning of this year, I decided it would be a good idea to do some canning this summer since we were going to be in a new house and I was going to have a cold storage (hooray!).  I also thought it would be a good way to build up our food storage, save a little money and learn a new skill.  

I am proud to say that I actually did do a bunch of canning this summer and fall and for the most part, it was successful considering I've never canned anything by myself before.

First, I did raspberry jam.  And I did not use just any raspberries.  Oh, no.  I used Bear Lake Raspberries.  I am telling you, if you have never had these raspberries, your life is not complete.  I got them from the farmer's market and even though they were a little more expensive that what I could have bought in the store, it was well worth the extra dough I had to fork out.  I made the jam in July and we are already on our third pint out of the five that I made.  I hope we can make it last until next year!

Next, I bottled peaches in September.  A neighbor of Covey's parents sold us a huge box of peaches--probably 15-20 pounds--for $15.  Killer deal and the peaches were divine.  We were able to get 11 quarts of peaches out of all those peaches.

Then, we decided to try our hand at pear/apple fruit leather about a week later.  I know this isn't canning, but originally we were going to bottle some pears that we had got for free from the same neighbor that sold us the peaches, but by the time we were able to get to it, some of the pears had gone bad and there weren't really enough to justify bottling them.  So we thought that fruit leather would be a good idea.  As they say, it's the thought that counts right?  Everything went really well, until it was time to take the leather off of the pans after drying out in the oven.  We thought it would be fine to use wax paper because we didn't have any parchment paper.  Bad move.  We ended up taking my hair dryer, putting it on a low setting and slowly heating up the fruit leather and trying to peel it off of the wax paper.  It was a very tedious process and I've determined that if I ever decide to do fruit leather again, I will be using parchment paper for sure.  On the upside, the fruit leather we were able to pry off turned out decent and we actually still have some left over.

We took a little break from canning for about a month or so until the grapes on Covey's parents vine were ripe so we could try making grape juice.  I had to follow Covey's lead on this one because I had never done grape juice before and he used to help his mom do it when he was younger.  It seriously took us all day long to do the juice, but we ended up with about 8 quarts or so.  We had some last week and it was actually pretty darn good if I say so myself.

Lastly, we bottled some apple pie filling this weekend.  I found a recipe on Our Best Bites and we went with that since it seemed pretty basic and easy to follow.  We got 11 pints of apple pie filling.  I tasted a little bit of the leftover sauce and piece of apple and it was good.  (This is coming from someone who isn't necessarily a huge fan of baked apples.)

All in all, I am pretty pleased with myself and my canning this year.  (Not to mention that I learned some good skills and some even better do's and don'ts.)  Covey actually helped me out with everything except for the jam, which I did at a neighbor's house.  He is such a good husband.  All this canning makes me feel oh-so-domestic.  Here's to next year! :)