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First we picked several buckets of raspberries and canned 44 jelly jars of raspberry jam. The last jars of jam came out of the hot water bath on the stove at 2:30 am.
The next day we made salsa. We went to our local farm stand and picked out a bushel of Roma tomatoes, a half bushel of sweet peppers - green, yellow and red, and a half bushel of red and sweet onions along with a quarter bushel of jalapeno peppers and Hungarian hot peppers in reds and yellows. Thie kitchen was overflowing with fresh vegetables.
The tomatoes we dipped into boiling water for a minute, then peeled each one, drained the juice, and chopped it up for the salsa. We chopped the onions, sweet peppers, and hot peppers to go with the tomatoes in a ratio of 4:2:2:1 (tomatoes:onions:sweet peppers:hot peppers). It took us two whole days to can 57 pints of salsa.
First we cooked the salsa. We sterilized the jars in boiling water. Then we used a canning funnel to put the salsa into the jars. We wiped the tops of the jars, added the lids and screwed on the bands. Then we placed the jars of hot salsa back in the boiling water for 15 minutes to process. After that we took out the jars and as they cooled, the lids began to pop. Each time a lid pops, that means the jar has sealed and will stay good on the shelf for as long as couple of years – but it never lasts that long around here.
We made three different canned salsa recipes that we found online, and tried two variations of each recipe to make it mild, medium or hot and give slightly different taste. We labeled each jar with a code for the different recipes and variations and kept a chart on the computer so we will know next winter which recipe we like best.
Canning is hot, exhausting work and we can’t quit until the job is done – but having our own locally grown food is wonderful when the snow flies!
