End of Summer

School will be starting next week, but it seems that I still haven't finished with the canning thing for the year.

Last weekend I stopped by a farm market for some tomatoes to can. While I was there, I also picked up some new potatoes, early apples, a cantaloupe, zucchini, corn, and a box of over-ripe peaches.

Let me tell you something about peaches. They are best if you go out to the trees, cup your hand underneath it, and it falls off in your hand. That is how you know if it is ripe. The next best thing is to find a farm market that sells peaches and buy a box of their over-ripes. You can get them for almost nothing, and with the exception of a few bruises, they will be the best thing you have ever put in your mouth. They are the "bite-into-it-and-juice-drips-off-of-your-elbow" ones that those in the know will fight over. These peaches are the proof that the fruit you get at the grocery store is a joke.

I picked up a "lug" (about 1/2 a bushel) of these over-ripe peaches for $10. We ate several of them fresh and I put the rest in the freezer. There were only 3 out of the whole box that I had to throw out because they were too damaged. I still had 9 quart-ish sized bags for the freezer. My husband had never really had a "good" peach before and was simply amazed. Now I need to get some more.

I told my dad about them. He wants to do a swap of canned peaches for canned pears. He has a buddy with pear trees that gives him 5 or 6 5 gallon buckets of pears every year. So Dad is going to can up some pears for me and I will can some peaches for him. We are already swapping plum jam and preserves for purple hull peas, so the fruit swap is just a bonus.

But it will keep me busy for a few days. Not that I have a problem with that.

Preserving foods

There is more than one way to preserve the fruits and veggies of summer. You can either can, freeze or dehydrate just about any kind of produce to save it for later in the year. I use all three different methods not only to save money, but also to control the quality of the food my family eats.

The dehydrator is a wonderful appliance for drying fruits and veggies for later use. It allows me to buy fresh food when it is on sale and use it later. I have dried onions, bell peppers, corn, strawberries, cantaloupe, fruit leathers, potatoes, whatever I have that will spoil before I can use it all. Just the onions alone save me a lot of money over buying the dried onion flakes. The strawberries are great in breakfast cereal, and the kids just love the dried fruit and the fruit leathers as a snack. I can store the fresh foods in the pantry instead of in the refrigerator so it take a lot less space and I know that they are eating something healthy instead of junk food.

The freezer, for us at least, is a must. I store everything from fresh veggies and meat to bread and grains in my freezer. Most foods can be frozen without loss of nutrition and it is extremely easy to do. And you do not need any special equipment to do it. All it takes are some good quality freezer bags. Just look in the frozen food section of your local grocery store to see the wide range of fruits and vegetables that can be frozen.

Canning is more time intensive and requires an investment in equipment and supplies. But once the initial investment is over, you can save loads of money on food by growing your own. We have such a tiny yard that we only grow high yield foods like beans and peas, but we do get a larger selection by going to farmer's markets and roadside stands. We also hit up relatives who garden for their extra produce. It is cost effective and delicious.

Some foods can be processed into jars without the use of a pressure cooker. Things like fruits generally do not have to be canned with pressure. Jellies,jams, pickles, and most tomatoes do not have to be pressure canned.

There are lots of resources online to find recipes for canning. Or you can buy a Ball Blue Book of Preserving. It will tell you how to preserve just about everything by several different methods. You can get one on Ebay for a couple of dollars or on Amazon for anywhere between $5-25 dollars. They are an extremely valuable resource for anyone who wants to preserve their own food.

Freezer Jam

I am going to start a series of posts on preserving food. It is a great time and money saver and it is a lot healthier that buying canned goods.

Since it is getting to be strawberry season, we will start with freezer jams. They are very easy, not very time consuming, and inexpensive to make. One of the best things about freezer jam is, since the fruit isn't cooked, it taste more like fresh fruit than store bought jams. You can use it just like fresh fruit.

To make 5 cups (more or less) of home made freezer jam, you will need:

3 or 4 pint jars or 5 or 6 half pint jars, well washed or sterilized in the dishwasher
Lids and rings to fit the jars
4 cups (more or less) of ripe fruit, washed and crushed
4 cups of sugar (or the equivalent amount of Splenda, I guess) and
1 box of Sure-Jell or other boxed pectin

Since I have never made the non-sugar versions, you might want to look up the directions for the sugar free versions of the jam. Every box of the Sure-Jell has the recipes inside and I think they tell how to make the sugar free versions, I just haven't looked them up.

Crushing the fruit isn't as hard as it sounds. As you wash your berries, or other fruit of choice, remember to crush a little bit at a time. This will make it a lot easier to make sure that they are all crushed. You can use the back of a fork or if you have one, use a pastry fork. A pastry fork is what I use. If you have never seen one, it looks like a D shaped piece of metal with a grip on the flat side and 3 or 4 rounded cutting edges on the curved side. It is used to blend butter or shortening into flour. Get one, it is very useful.

After your fruit is crushed and it is very juicy in the bottom of your bowl, mix in the 4 cups of sugar. This has the added bonus of drawing even more juice out of the fruit and will make a much better jam. Let it set for about 10 minutes.

While you are letting your fruit set, get out a small sauce pan. Mix 3/4 cup of water and your powdered pectin over a medium low heat to dissolve. You have to keep stirring it or it will stick to the bottom of the pan but it will dissolve fairly quickly. Keep stirring until you get a good rolling boil. Then start timing it. The pectin needs to boil for at least a full minute but not more than 2.

Pour all of the pectin into the bowl of fruit. Stir all of this together for at least 3 minutes. You want to make sure that everything is very well mixed. You will notice that the liquid in the fruit is getting clearer and thicker. This is a good thing. The more juice in the jam, the better it will taste and the easier it will spread.

Now you are ready to fill your jars. Ideally, you would use a ladle and a filling ring( a funnel with a really big whole in the middle). If you don't have those things, you can just use a big spoon, but you have to be careful not to get jam all over the jars. Fill the jars to within an inch of the top. That is about at the point on the jars where the threads start or if you are using standard mouth jars, where the curve of the jar meets the thread. Using a damp rag, wipe off the top of the jar so that there isn't any food on the top. Put on a lid and tighten a ring around it. It needs to be secure but it don't have to be so tight it takes a pipe wrench to get it off.

Now you let your jam sit at room temperature until it jells up. You can tell by tilting the jar a little to see if it is still runny. If it is, let it set some more, up to 24 hours. If it isn't, put it in the freezer. It will last up to a year(if you don't eat it before then) in the freezer or 3 weeks open in the fridge.

Freezer Jam is a lot more than just something to make PB & J or to spread on toast in the morning. I have used it to spoon over angel food cake, ice cream, and even roasting meat. I used some raspberry jam to put between layers of a chocolate cake. That was really awesome.