Homemade Apple Pie Filling

This last weekend went by so fast. We had a nice Thanksgiving with friends and family. I got to cook more than I thought I would, which was a good thing. We also got a start on our holiday shopping, though we are going to be mostly giving away homemade gifts and goodies this year. Most of the weekend was spent canning. We made one last final attempt to use up the rest of our apples and were quite successful.

Saturday we picked up a water bath canner. Up to this point I had been using the pressure canner for everything. The pressure canner is faster and smaller, however most of the recipes for fruit are written for water bath processing. This meant that every time I found a recipe I wanted to try I would have to go into my Mirro manual and check all of the ingredients to see which had the longest processing time. It still worked quite well though. The only reason we realy needed the water bath canner was for its size. We wanted to try canning apple pie filling in quart jars, and maybe only one or two would have fit in our pressure cooker.

Apple Pie Filling

This was a really fun recipe that I found it in an old Better Homes and Gardens canning book. This was my first time using the raw packing method. Rather than cooking everything together, the apple slices are packed into the jar raw and then covered in hot syrup.

Here's the new water bath canner. It barely fits on one burner. However it does fit six quart jars without any problem.

This would have taken us a very long time using the pressure cooker, But they all fit snugly into the water bath, with room for probably one more.

I can now see why people say its so handy to have the long handled jar lifters. That water bath canner gets really hot. This is the processed pie filling leaving the canner.

I'm not going to lie. I had my first non-sealing freakout with this batch. About 30 minutes into cooling I checked the seals (I know you're supposed to let them sit for much longer, but I was too excited). Only two of the jars had sealed properly. I could have cried. Long story short, larger jars take much longer to cool, and therefore much longer to seal. I checked again several hours later and they had all sealed just fine. Patience really is a virtue.

Besides the pie filling, I also did several quarts of apple sauce and some smaller jars of apple jelly. The best part is that we are now officially done with our apples. I will be trying out the pie filling this weekend. I've never made a pie from scratch so wish me luck.

Canning Salsa

This last Thursday I attempted to make and can homemade salsa. We have a plethora of beautiful veggies that was given to us by my mom-in-law, who happens to be an amazingly talented gardener. Every year she grows heaps of herbs, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, carrots and peppers. My husband isn't really a tomato person, and we had too many for me to finish on my own, so I was very excited about the idea of using some to can salsa.

I wasn't really sure how it would turn out. I'm really much more of a fresh salsa kind of girl. I love to just chop up fresh tomatoes and pepper, add a bit of cilantro, garlic and onion, add a splash of fresh squeezed lime and I'm in heaven.

I started out with these cute little tomatoes. Mind you, this is only about half of what I used in the recipe and maybe a quarter of what we have still in the refrigerator. In the end I used probably close to seven cups of these little tomatoes. To prepare the skins for removal I boiled them for 45 seconds and then let them sit in ice cold water. Removing the skins was very easy, but it was also quite time consuming due to the tomatoes miniature size.

After removing the skins, I squeezed out as much of the tomato juice as I could, so that the salsa would not be runny.

I chopped up two green bell peppers, fresh from farmers market.

Here are some of the peppers that my mom-in-law gave us. I'm still not even sure what all of them are. Every cooking show I have ever seen has said to remove the seeds. In my fresh salsas, I like to leave them in because I like a bit of extra heat. I figured though, that since this was my first time making cooked salsa I should probably try to follow the rules just this once.

I cored each of the peppers and removed the seeds (as sloppily has I could to leave a few behind). Look at that beautiful rainbow of pepper!

I Chopped up some fresh cilantro too. I was pretty bummed that I couldn't use my own. I accidentally over harvested a few weeks back and am probably going to have to replant. I chopped one whole onion, one clove of garlic, added some salt and squeezed the juice from one lime.

I then threw the the whole mess in a frying pan and started cooking on high heat.

After just a few minutes the salsa began to cook down and release its juices. This made the house smell amazing.

After everything was cooked through, I threw everything in the blender for about 30 seconds to make a prettier prettier and more even consistency. I then poured it all back into the pan for several minutes of cooking.

Canning the salsa was easy enough, though I had the hardest time finding advice on how to pressure can salsa. Almost all salsa recipes are processed using the hot water bath method, and and as such include either vinegar or lemon juice to increase the acidity. My own recipe included lime juice, but probably not enough to make this type of canning safe. I looked up each of my ingredients and found the necessary pressure cooking time for each. The only one I couldn't find was cilantro, I decided this would probably be considered a "green" and would require one hour of cooking at 10 pounds of pressure. I realize this was probably going way overboard for salsa, but I would much rather be safe than sorry.

Here's the result. I haven't opened either jar yet, but I tasted the salsa before I stared canning. Its much sweeter than I expected due to all of the cooked peppers. I must admit that I was disappointed about the level of heat. I like my salsa with quite a bit more kick, so next time I will not be removing any of the seeds. Still, it should go nicely over chicken or inside enchiladas.

I will let you know how my next batch goes.

Pre-canning Berry Picking Goodness

We're getting so close! I have pretty much everything we need. My family has been so generous, dropping of canning supplies and cookbooks, and I'm almost ready. I tested out the pressure cooker on Monday too. Not for canning but just a normal meal to get comfortable with it. I was nervous at first but I'm still alive to tell the tale, and the food didn't come out half bad either.

The husband and I both had the day off today, so we drove up to Green Bluff to pick berries. We stopped at Knapp's Berries and loaded up on raspberries and blackberries. We had a good time and picked about five pounds in all.

There were bees but they didn't seem to be bothered by us too much. No stings. It got really hot towards the end, so I think next time we'll have to leave much earlier in the morning.

My husband was much better at picking than me too. He attributes this to his Iowa roots. I'm not sure if I'm convinced. We only picked enough for a small batch of each jam, so if things go sour we won't have too much to cry about.

 
As much as I love Spokane, its nice to get out of the city, even for just a few hours. Green Bluff is a community of growers just north of Spokane, and its nice for a day trip. Its beautiful up there and have you ever noticed how things always taste so much better fresh picked than from the super market? Hopefully we will be able to go back for pumpkins in a few months.