The Tilsons

Last year I canned beet pickles and peaches on the same weekend with my mom, which was insane; by 11pm we were into the Irish Cream to spare each other from each other. This year I decided it would be a good idea to can tomatoes and pears on the same weekend. Not only that, but make two different kinds of pears (canned quarters and pear butter) and two different kinds of tomatoes (tomato sauce and canned tomato quarters), by myself for the most part (thank you Justin for stepping in when it got tough) This all not taking into consideration that I woke up a bit sick on Friday, with some strange neck pain (resistance to canning?), that Justin had fat that had to be made into soap this weekend and that we had dinner invites coming, that we prepared dinner for unwittingly on the wrong night.

So, the tomatoes. They were ripe first, so as per the recipe I sorted thirty pounds of the ripest ones out to be blanched, peeled, cored, cooked and strained into puré. Little did I know, that I would be 2 quarts short of what the recipe called for when I measured after this long process. As the rest of the tomatoes were not ripe enough to be done, I pillaged our garden for 15 more pounds of tomatoes, and started again. Finally, after another round, enough puré was in the pot to be made into sauce and canned.

Then pears. Pears are slightly more work because their skins don’t just fall off like peaches or tomatoes. You actually have to hand peel them! So, I sorted about 3/4 of the pears out to be washed, peeled, quartered and canned. That whole process went rather well, albeit long, especially after the tomatoe sauce.  The pear butter went well also, however, the butter takes a long, long time to thicken, drawing out the day, into the evening and then long into the night.

Next, the canned tomatoes. Beth came over sunday evening and we prepared them together, just as I did with the tomatoe sauce tomatoes. That was my first mistake. Apparently one is only supposed to pepare one quarts tomatoes at a time, this resulted in the tomates going bad in the fridge overnight because I was too tired and frustrated with my third mistake to finish. My second mistake was not having an up to date canning book. I found out fairly late in the game that instead of being processed for 40 mins like my mom used to in the 80’s, one is supposed to process them for 85 mins! I learned this just in time. My third mistake was that my mom’s, or possibly my grammas old jars stuck out of the water a wee bit. I figured that would be fine, being that my mom had canned with them, but no, after about 70 mins in the hot bath, the tops exploded right off and sprayed tomatoe sauce all over my walls, blowing the lid clear off of the pot!  At that point, it was midnight, I decided that a fourth mistake was too much, so I wrapped things up and hit the hay.  (Only to wake up in the morning to find that some of my pre prepared tomates had molded in the night)

Take it from me, two foods in one weekend is not a good idea if you want to do it right and have any patience left for anything. On the other hand, I am really happy with having it all done and in the pantry. To help for the next round, I have bought Bernardin’s latest edition of proper canning methods, hopefully I won’t have to learn the hard way all the time.

I also strongly recomend, that if you are canning by yourself, have an audiobook plugged in. Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer was my book of choice for this canning project, it was very inspiring and kept my mind off of the back pain!