I tried and I tried but Emily got pickled the other night. Of course, the same night, I got pretty sauced so I guess we’re even. The garden hasn’t produced most things very well this year but we do have a lot of tomatoes and cucumbers.
(Ahhh…sauced!)We’ve already made plenty of salsa with the tomatoes and peppers, onions, etc that we got. We figured tomato sauce can be used for about everything so we made a batch of that. It’s pretty easy really so it was ideal. We run the tomatoes through our Velox tomato press and then throw it all in a crockpot to cook down. Some folks boil their tomato puree until it is half the volume. We just throw it in the crockpot (uncovered) and forget about it for 24 hours. By then, it is cooked down and we are oficially sauced. I think we had about 2500 pounds of tomatoes and once it was all cooked down, we ended up with 5 pints of sauce. We’ll run throuhg several more batches of sauce because it is so handy when we need to make something yummy over the winter!
(That’s the good stuff…I love the smell of vinegar and pickling spices)Neither Emily nor I like cucumbers raw. Emily doesn’t like them pickled either but she’s sauced, obviously. Anyhow, I love pickles so we made a bunch with the cukes we harvested this year. I grow dill too so we definitely made our pickles from some of the freshest ingredients around. I suppose we could make vinegar, but I don’t think we’re ready for that yet. Anyhow, I love making pickles because the smells of the ingredients take me back to when my Grandma canned pickles. She canned tons of stuff and the smells and the warmth of the kitchen remind me of her<sniff, sniff>
(This is really a pressure canner but it’s deep enough to water bath can too…without the lid of course)Ok, so it was a bunch of fun getting pickled too. Don’t tell, but I figure we’re get pickled and sauced a bunch more times this summer!