Orange Marmalade

I took on a challenge to make something new each month in the food canning arena.  Food In Jars is a great resource for all kinds of fruit and pickle canning information and ideas for something new instead of the "tried and true."


That said, I made a new recipe, but a favorite flavor: orange marmalade. I used my Instant Pot to speed the process along and it was very easy! No slicer here except my trusty knife, but cutting the oranges went quickly. Since my oranges were pretty sweet, I added sugar in a 1:1 ratio by weight to the fruit. I took bad advice from another recipe and put too much water in for the first cooking, so the marmalade's set was soft, but delicious nonetheless.

My girls and I picked some more oranges from our friend's tree, so I'm ready to try a second batch!

Another canning first

Ever since buying my handy dandy pressure cooker last year, I've been looking for opportunities to can things I never could before.  I'd seen a company called Zaycon that sells bulk meat and finally the price was good enough to make me trek across town to pick up an order, so I ordered a 40 pound box of chicken breasts.  I knew I wanted to freeze some of it, but 1) I don't have lots of room in my freezer, although it is a second freezer kept outside, and 2) I wanted some chicken cooked and ready to go, and 3) I wanted to try pressure canning meat.  So I froze about half the chicken and canned the rest.

So easy!

Here are the last three jars of nineteen I canned and . . . why can with a partly-empty canner?  So I did five jars of pinto beans as well to fill the canner.  I love that thing!

Figs

My neighbor brought me the last of the figs from her fig bush this morning.  She'd brought some over a couple of days before and they were divinely delicious.

I didn't know if  I could eat all the ones she brought so I decided to make jam out of them.  I had three envelopes of Ball Pectin for low- or no-sugar jam in my pantry and wanted to try them out.  Everything went well, but I don't love the jam.  It turned out to have a consistency more like applesauce than jam and I think that was because I used about 1/4 the amount of sugar I would have typically used.  It's not bad, but I'll make full-sugar jam next time. 

I got 6 half-pints in my new canning jars.  Aren't they a great size?  They have a wide mouth so they are super convenient for spooning jam out.  I didn't really need any more jars, but I saw them in the store . . . .

Lots of tomatoes today!

Today was Market on the Move which is the one that gives you up to 60 pounds of produce for a $10 donation.  It's produce that would have gone to the landfill in Nogales, Arizona because it was not picked up at the inspection station for one reason or another.

 

I needed a few more jars of spaghetti sauce and had a couple packets of Mrs. Wage's spaghetti sauce spice which I bought at a deep discount last year.  Time to get 'em made.

 

I had a full box of Roma tomatoes and about 3/4 of another one.  If you look closely you can see a tomato in this box I definitely did not use.  Part of the price for this kind of produce.

 

 I washed tomatoes in the right side, then cut the core out and removed the seeds before giving them a quick dip in boiling water to make the skins slip off.  Excess skin and cores went in to the compost bucket.

 The tomatoes in the orange bowl were cooling enough for me to remove the skins and put the tomatoes in the Ninja blender.

 In the back is the spaghetti sauce and on the front burner the front is the first batch of tomato puree.  That's what I made with the excess tomatoes since I already had enough salsa and diced tomatoes in jars on the pantry shelf.

 The result was 17 jars of spaghetti sauce and tomato puree in various sizes, mostly pints.

A homey Saturday

Today was a homemaking kind of Saturday.  First thing this morning I went to Market On The Move which is the food co-op where for $10 you can have up to about 60 pounds of produce that would have been taken from the inspection station at the US-Mexican border to the dump because it was not picked up on time. 

I got:

tomatoes
English cucumbers
yellow summer squash
little sweet bell peppers

Doesn't sound like much, but from the tomatoes I got:

30 jars of diced tomatoes.  They were all pints except the last one which was a half-pint.  I was out of tomato pints (still have a few quarts) and was having to use store-bought ones. (!!!)

David stopped by around lunch time, then he and Bill went to a gun show.  It was David's first and he was quite intrigued, Bill said.

A little later Alicia dropped in and we chatted while I finished up the canning.  She suddenly had a hankering to pet and hold a chicken, so I sent her out with a container of scraps to entice them.  They're very friendly.

You can see the towels drying in the sun behind her.  I got a couple of loads of laundry done too.

 

In the evening, a cook-out with David and Alicia and all of us.

 

It was a good day.

What to do with lots of pineapple?

We got two good-sized pineapples from our fruit and vegetable co-op last time.  One was ready in a few days and the other was dead green.  Just as it was getting ripe, my cute neighbor gave me a large pineapple she had already prepared for eating.  We love pineapple, but two ready at once was too much for us so . . . I made pineapple jam.

I have never made pineapple jam, but how could you go wrong with pineapple, pectin, and sugar?

The big pineapple made a batch by itself.  My pineapple was a little smaller and I had to supplement it with about half a can of commercially prepared crushed pineapple.  Not a biggie and both batches turned out nicely.  I got 6 pints and 2 half pints, in addition to about .75 pints I put into a plastic container and put in the fridge to use right away.

Grapefruit Jam II

I took a jar of the jam I made in the spring along with my new favorite crackers to the book club last week and the jam was a hit.  I kept looking at the tree outside with large pink grapefruits dangling in with the medium green developing ones and knew I needed to make more grapefruit jam.

I wanted more than 3 little half pints this time, so I doubled the number of fruits I picked.  You can't do that with pectin jam because you need a precise amount of pectin/fruit/acid/sugar/heat, but since this kind of jam is nothing more than fruit/sugar/heat, I knew I could double it.

Now here was the problem I ran into:  I couldn't get the jam to come up to a temperature higher than boiling.  Not gonna gel that way.  I thought about it and realized I probably needed more sugar.  I tasted the runny jam and it was sweet, but not "jam sweet," so I added a cup of sugar to the five I had already put in.  The temperature came up a couple of degrees.  I added just 1/2 a cup more and it came all the way up to 220F (104.4C).

At that point I ladeled it into jars, cleaned out the pot, filled it with water and jars and processed them for 10 minutes in boiling water.

Here is a comparison.  The first one is yesterday's jam.  You can see it is much lighter and softer.  The one on the right is the Spring '12 version and was cooked more to get it to set up and thus is much darker, but also has a more spreadable consistency.  In additon, the fruit was not as sweet in the spring and the dark jam has a nice tartness to it.  Yesterday's jam is sweet from the sugar of course, but doesn't have any tartness because the grapefruits are really sweet this time of year.

I enjoyed comparing the two batches.  Dh and I decided we prefer the new jam, but both are good.

 I ended up with:

2 pints

4 half-pints

Yum.

How to store your cupcake liners

 Go look at this blog post about how to store your cupcake liners. 

I call them cupcake liners instead of muffin cups because I first thought she was going to talk about some kind of cup made of muffin batter.  When I clicked on the post I realized she was talking about the paper liners.  However, I never use paper liners with muffins because the muffin sticks to them unless you have time to let them sit for awhile.  I do need to check out those grease-proof liners she mentions, because maybe those would work for muffins.

I DO use them for cupcakes and found several packages in the back of my deep pantry cupboard that I'd forgotten about.  So nice to have them all in one tidy place now.

Being prepared

source

No, this isn't me with my best canning buddy, although I hope I can find a great price on peaches this year so I can put up a few.  I'd love to have a canning buddy too, although Caroline is turning into one, so I may have a home-grown one from now on.

There is a trend in the United States to can--peaches, tomatoes, pickles, spaghetti sauce, jam, jelly, you name it.  It's exciting because I've been a canner all of my life.  Limited for the most part, but a canner nevertheless.

I've become a customer of Azure Standard through a buying club in my town.  I am a patron of our local Family Home Storage Center.  I keep my eyes open for opportunities to maintain, consume, and increase our home food storage.

Dh and I have a debt-reduction plan and are laying our debts to rest.

I want to be prepared for at least some of life's surprises.

This canning was not worth it!

Things between my Victorio strainer and me did not go well today and I'm not sure what happened.  From about 28 lbs of Roma tomatoes, here is my result:

Tomato sauce:

6 pints
4 half-pints

 The sauce came out of the strainer much thinner than expected and took a lot of cooking down.  I did get it to a very nice consistency though.  It's all on my pantry shelves now and I love to see my handiwork there, almost as much as I enjoy eating it!

Grapefruit Jam

This morning I received an email with a link to Food in Jars' grapefruit jam. Grapefruit jam . . . the thought had never occurred to me! And I have a certain 25' grapefruit tree out in the back yard.

I picked nine fruits because the recipe said eight large and although mine are huge, the fruit inside is considerably smaller. I prepared them using my favorite method, then chopped them finely.

This part sounds weird to me, but the recipe said to save any seeds, tie them in a cloth, and cook them with the fruit because a little pectin will come out of the seeds. Most people don't use leftover fabric from sewing two skorts . . . but I do.

All you use is the fruit and some sugar, so here it all is in the pot ready to cook.

It took a lot longer to come up to 220 degrees than the 20 minutes the recipe indicated. It was more like 45 minutes, but by then it had thickened nicely. From the Food in Jars website I got the idea to use my electric oven probe/thermometer as a candy thermometer and it worked great since my candy thermometer curiously turned up broken awhile ago.

I didn't want to get my canner out for just three little jars, so after ladeling the jam into the jars (three, not four the recipe promised me--maybe I should have gotten ten or twelve grapefruits), I washed the pot out, got the water hot, put the three little jars in, then brought it all up to a boil.

Now I have three beautiful jars sitting on my counter.

It's the first time in twenty years I've made jam without packaged pectin and I'm ready to do it again.

Oh, and I've already heard the tops on all three jars click. They are sealed!

This might be tomorrow's project

Market on the Move is supposed to have cucumbers tomorrow. If so, I'm going to get some and make pickle relish (the kind you put on hot dogs). I've never made relish like this before, but why not try?

sourceI also expect Roma tomatoes there tomorrow, and if so I'll try to get a case of them to make more plain canned tomatoes. We're going through them a lot faster these days than we have in the past.

See the difference?

On the left is one of my oldest Kerr pint canning jars and on the right is one of my newest. The old one is very square and the glass is so thick my canning funnel doesn't fit down into it all the way. The new jar is thinner and rounded and doesn't interest me nearly as much!

By the way, I think the reason I have always preferred Kerr jars over Ball jars is because 1) my mom always used Kerr jars and 2) my name starts with a K and I loved to look at the pretty K on jars of fruit on the table when I was a child.

Market on the Move

Here in Arizona we have an unusual situation. Fresh produce is trucked up from Mexico and is inspected in Nogales, Arizona. Sometimes for one reason or another, the produce does not continue on its journey north. It might have started to go bad, it might be too dirty or have scratches on the surface of the produce, or the trucking schedules might not be set to pick it up. When the warehouse is full and another load is on its way, the warehouse will take the produce to the landfull. About two full trailer loads get dumped every day.

Market on the Move is sponsored by a group called The 3000 Club. Each week three trucks pick up this donated produce and bring it to rotating sites in Tucson and Phoenix. For a $10 donation, people can choose up to 60 pounds of produce. The rest goes to food banks. This is a tiny fraction of what I brought home today:

I brought home:

25 lbs of Roma tomatoes
6 large salad tomatoes
3 quarts of grape tomatoes
1 basket of cherry tomatoes
2 kinds of hot peppers
10 green bell peppers
8 red bell peppers
10 zucchini
10 yellow squash
13 small ears of corn
5 eggplants

The Roma tomatoes turned into 13 pints of diced tomatoes and 9 pints of salsa, along with some of the peppers.

The eggplant and more bell peppers turned into a Spanish eggplant dish for the freezer. You'll see that on the menu a couple of times over the next month or two.

Tomorrow some of the zucchinis will find their way into zucchini muffins for the freezer for our regular Monday muffin breakfasts.

We gave away a lot of the produce to our neighbor and a friend who provides us with delicious bakery bread for free every 2 weeks.

It was a busy day, but I'm feeling very satisfied.

Trash to treasure [Hmm . . . this was supposed to post yesterday . . . not sure what happened]

Yesterday was Bountiful Baskets day and as usual I volunteered to help with the distribution. If there is produce that is not good enough for distribution to the members, it is put into the "chicken food" box and I take it home for the feathered girls. Usually it is stray lettuce leaves and maybe a couple of items with some decay on them. Chickens don't eat decay, so I always cut off that part before I give it to them.

However, this time in addition to the lettuce and a couple of strawberries, there were about 7 big tomatoes that needed just a small part cut off. The chickens would have enjoyed them, but I knew my family would enjoy them more in the form of salsa. I cleaned the tomatoes up and diced them, along with some other tomatoes we had on hand, diced up a small onion that was also in the box, and added a measured amount of Ball salsa seasoning along with the requisite vinegar for acidity.

I got 8.5 pints (4 liters for the Aussies, Canuks, and Koreans). I processed 7 pints so the salsa is shelf-stable, and refridgerated the other 1.5 jars because my canner only holds 7 jars and I didn't want to run a second canner load for just the 2 jars.

All 9 jars of salsa cost me only about $2 total, which was the cost of the vinegar and the salsa mix. Oh, and a bit for the electricity for cooking/canning.

Sorting pears

I noticed through the holes in the pear boxes that there was some perceptible ripening going on so I opened up all three boxes and sorted them. All but FOUR pears had annoying little price code/bar code stickers on them so the girls and I peeled them off to avoid taking the sticker and the skin off together later. Almost all of the pears are still hard green, but there was a little softening on some. The ones at 3 o'clock in the picture are the "ripest" then going counterclockwise they get greener until by the third box, they are all the same. It will still be a few days before I do any canning. I bought 10 lbs. more of sugar and I think that will be enough for 100 lbs. of pears (I bought a third box). I'm going to put 1/4 cup sugar in each jar to make a light syrup. Maybe less.

On an unrelated note, just a few minutes ago a man and a woman in an expensive SUV stopped in front of the house, the driver took a picture of our house, then they sped off. AEM, if you want to know what the house looks like, just ask.

A summer day in the Southwest USA

I know, I know, my faithful readers are going to get darned tired of seeing our thermometer on this blog, but although I grew up with summer temperatures like this, I haven't lived there (Sacramento) in 30 years, so this kind of stuff seems new and interesting to me. Anyway, we had the neighbor boy and his mother over to swim this morning. Gotta say . . . when you're in the pool or wet from the pool you're very comfortable despite crazy temperatures. The pool water was the clearest it's ever been this morning. I could see the bottom in the shallow end and could fuzzily see the automatic cleaner down 10-11 feet in the deep end. I wish I knew which of the many measures we've taken to clear the cloudiness is working because then we'd do more of it.

Dh is home studying for an exam this afternoon. It's nice to have everyone home.

The natural foods market near us (Sunflower Farmer's Market, similar to Trader Joe's) has great produce and advertises they have "Silly Prices." I wouldn't exactly say the prices are all cheap, but they have good specials and I don't think their food is over-the-top expensive. The item that caught my eye today was on the front page: Bartlett pears 3 lbs/$1. Those are canning prices to me, ones I haven't seen since I lived in Nampa, Idaho, in the midst of dozens of orchards. I hopped right on over to the store and bought two cases of 36 lbs each. I think I should have bought one more and will probably go back in a day or two. A hundred pounds of pears will only make about 3 dozen quart jars and that is about the amount I want. So another box it will be. I also have to pick up more sugar. I haven't done any large-scale canning like this in a few years and I half dread it for the work and half look forward to it for the sense of satisfaction I get when it's done and I have all that lovely fruit for my family to enjoy later. As pear canners know, 72 pounds of pears today doesn't mean 72 pounds of pears canned tomorrow. I'll pick them out of the boxes as they ripen and do them over a few days once they start turning yellow.