So on Wednesday I canned tomatoes. I was a little scared but I pressed on. With a little help from the internet and what Elizabeth had told me and some handouts gathered at Penn State's Ag Progress Days.
I'll Just say that Peeling and coring tomatoes is not my new favorite thing to do. (Is there a better way than dunking them on boiling water ONE AT A TIME?) The rude noises they made when mashed with a potato masher may have made up for it!
I was grateful to have this really neat lid picker upper tool. I have no clue how I would have retrieved metal lids from boiling water otherwise. I also have some awesome hot can tongs and a tool that not only tells me exactly how much headspace is 1/2 inch it is also useful for releasing air pockets...(why is it important to release air pockets?)
Here are my first 4 quarts of tomatoes processing like champs!!! I did 4 because i thought I only had 4 quart jars. (After I was finished i found 3 more..... :/ ) So I decided to put the rest in pint jars of which I had 12 but only needed 6.
I thought I could use the 45 minutes that the quarts were boiling to prep the pints. That was when i heard an odd sound in the basement. Something like water running. Since I had previously decided not to attempt to do laundry while canning tomatoes I knew there was no reason for water to be running in the basement.
So I went (frantically panicked-ly ran) down stairs and discovered water dripping from the ceiling onto the floor and washing machine.
As it turned out, part of the sink drain pipe came apart. (This may or may not have been related to the few quarts of boiling water I poured down the drain after sterilizing the jars....) So water was filling the cupboard pouring through the hole in the cupboard onto the floor under the sink and running through the hole in the floor into the basement.
After a quick panicked call to Micah at work, I emptied the cupboard, and got lots of towels to dry up the mess. (Yes, the dead plants were in the cupboard. The basket just happened to be sitting there.) I pushed the pipes back together and when Micah got home he tightened and screwed whatever it was that had come loose.
In the end I have four beautiful quarts and six lovely (un-photographed) pints of canned tomatoes.
1 comment:
The top photo is lovely, I'd frame that and hang it in my kitchen, and your kitchen floor is beautiful. Some people wash their tomatoes, throw them in a bag and freeze them. Once frozen, they take them out and pour them into a sink full of hot water, then peel and core. I've never tried it, I usually don't have any room in the freezer, but there you go! My canning adventure this year involved buying a pressure canner and canning meat- the easiest thing I've ever canned!
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