I love this time of year. The farm produce is at its peak and I live not far from the best farming regions in the province. A short drive takes me out the the Fraser Valley where I can pick up field fresh tomatoes, fresh picked corn, crisp pickling cucumbers, flats of blueberries from the fields across the way, and so on.
Every year I take the end of August off to take advantage of the bounty and to put up jars of deliciousness for the coming winter.
Several years ago I discovered the magic of pressure canning and an entire new galaxy of possibilities opened up before me.
I now no longer freeze soup stock. No more plastic bags of chicken and turkey stock in the freezer that can fall on my toes. No waiting for stock to thaw, wondering if the bags will have a pinhole somewhere (don’t they always?).
Now my stock is in quart jars on the pantry shelf, ready and waiting for soup inspiration at a moments notice.
Other fabulous things that can now be kept ready and waiting at room temperature…
- Homemade Boston baked beans with double smoked bacon
- Chickpeas, kidney beans, black beans
- Chili
- Sliced beets
- Corn based salsa
- Tikka masala sauce
- Butter chicken sauce
- Butternut squash chunks ready for pureeing into a soup base
- And so many more treasures.
Today I dealt with 30 cobs of fresh picked corn. I peeled the husks back and removed the silk, cut off the kernels, and then rewrapped the empty cobs with the husks. Those went into the oven to roast at 400C for a half hour while I packed the corn kernels into 15 pint jars and pressure canned them for an hour.
When the cobs were finished roasting, the husks were removed and the cobs went into a pot with a couple of onions, a few bay leaves, some peppercorns, and a few sprigs of fresh thyme and parsley. That simmered away for an hour and a half until it turned into golden and flavourful deliciousness that went into four quart jars for pressure processing when the pints of corn kernels were finished processing, for another hour.
And while that was processing, I made up a big batch of basic BBQ sauce and ladled it into four pint jars, 12 half-pint jars, and seven quarter-pint jars, and then processed it for 30 minutes.
I have a few pounds of pickling cucumbers to turn into bread and butter pickles, and many tens of pounds of tomatoes that will be canned (some pressure, some water-bath) as diced tomatoes, strained tomatoes, tomato-vegetable sauce, piquant tomato sauce, chipotle apple bbq sauce, pizza sauce, butter chicken sauce….. that “should” take care of all the tomatoes I purchased.
Yes, I do love this time of year.
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