Has it really been a month since I blogged? Yikes!

So since I did so much canning this year most of it is stored in boxes in my office and coat closet in the front entrance. I’m not going to go count all the jars mainly because there is just too much! I’m pretty sure I kept fairly accurate records in my home management binder and I’m going to keep track of when we run out of things so I know how much to do next year.

Here is what I’ve done since my last canning post:

Peaches (100 more lbs)  most of these got preserved in ultra light syrup. My kids LOVE them. Luke calls them ‘bapples’ and could easily eat half a quart in one sitting if I would let him. 

Pears: 50lbs (organic from apple man)

-20 lbs into pear sauce for the kids to have in porridge

-10 lbs in light syrup

-30 lbs  into pear/applesauce

Apples: (150lbs organic gala, mac, and Eckhart) This was all turned into applesauce. So far I have at least 30 quarts and I still have one box of apples to sauce.

Grapes: 6 lbs into jelly. I didn’t use those yucky wine tasting concord grapes. I used normal red grapes. *ahem*

Beans: 8 lbs into Pickled green beans. Yum! We all love these. I made more but I still don’t think it’s going to be enough to last us the entire year.

Asparagus: 4 lbs pickled asparagus. I did this fairly recently so I don’t know how it will taste. It looks great though! I’m glad I froze my extra dill when I was doing pickles.

Carrots: 30 lbs dilled pickled carrots. We all love these too. I have more frozen dill and I think I’ll probably be making more of these sometime soon if we keep going through them at this rate! There is a stall at our farmers market with carrots all year which will make it easier.

Cucumbers: 40 lbs

-20 into bread & butter pickles: YUM! I am not sharing these with anyone, my husband is lucky if I share them with him when a jar is open. I’ll probably make only these next year.

-20 into dill pickles. These are all right. We aren’t big dill pickle eaters here for some reason… Everyone definitely prefers the bread & butter pickles.

I have no idea how many tomatoes I have done. I forgot to count while I was doing them so I’ll keep a tally as we take them out to use them.

Zucchini salsa:  yum! Nathaniel loves this and I love cooking with it. It makes great salsa chicken!

I thought my canning was winding down for the year but I just found out that Nathaniel’s aunt who lives a couple blocks from us has TWO pressure canners and would be happy to let me borrow them… so I guess I’m not winding down afterall. 🙂 Now that I have a pressure canner at my disposable I’m planning on doing some tomato/spaghetti type sauce and definitely some chicken and beef stock.

I have really focused this year on canning things that I know will help reduce our grocery budget. We aren’t big jam eaters, both my kids and husband prefer honey so I didn’t do much jam (well except the 80 something pints my mom and I did… I have raspberry jam coming out of my ears!). 

Wow this is a long boring post. I don’t have time to put pictures in though sorry! I do have an applesauce post coming up though… I have learned a lot about it this year!