Wednesday, August 14, 2013

I can CAN!

I have wanted to learn how to can for awhile now. Thanks to Pinterest I have become enamored with the idea of making as much as I can from scratch. I have always loved to bake and cook, but nothing like I do now. I bake several days a week. Breads, cookies, candy, bars, cakes, and whatever else I find on Pinterest that looks good! I love to bake for my family, especially making my kids homemade versions of their favorite treats.

I have butter and cream cheese out right now to make some amazingly delicious raspberry cheesecake cookies. These are my husbands favorite cookies right now. Very similar to the ones they have/had at Subway. I have also started doubling most cookie dough recipes and freezing my dough in my mini muffin tins to make dough disks and keep them in the freezer so we can have fresh baked HOMEMADE cookies whenever the mood strikes us. I will try to take pics and post about it tonight or tomorrow!

Anyways.... back to canning! Next week I am planning on attending a canning class at our local library to learn how to can tomatoes and pickles. Last night I decided to bite the bullet and tried canning, like real cook and process in a water bath canning. I poured over the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving (a.k.a. the canning Bible) and decided to make strawberry jam. Last month my mom and I went to a u-pick strawberry patch and came home with 27 POUNDS of strawberries. Yikes. We made several batches of freezer jam and froze the rest of the berries whole. The freezer jam is delicious and wonderful. It was my first time ever making freezer jam and it turned out pretty good. I got majorly freaked out by all the sugar needed in the recipes so we adjusted it a bit.

I did not take any pictures last night while canning. I was too nervous to even think about it. I waited until the kiddos went to bed and got to work in the kitchen. All-in-all it went pretty well. I made 4 pints of strawberry jam. All 4 jars sealed properly and are now resting comfortably in our cupboard. Yay me. I am definitely going to try a few more recipes this weekend to get my feet a little wetter. We have a TON of tomato plants and I am guessing next week we will have a TON of tomatoes ready to be canned.

Thanks for reading my ramblings and I look forward to sharing my canning adventures.

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