Salsa!

It looks like the tomatoes are being kind this year and not all ripening at once, at least so far.  But they are ripening in batches large enough that we were able to make a shakshuka (about 2 2/3 lbs.) for dinner for the weekend and still have at least 6 lbs. to make a batch of salsa today.  I had a mix of Roma, Early Girl, Big Boy, and Beefmaster to work with.

 

I use Ball's Spicy Tomato Salsa recipe, which is in the Blue Book but which I can't find online to link.  It uses 6 lbs. of tomatoes, 9 dried hot chili peppers (I use chipotles), 3 cups diced red onion, 1 1/2 cups chopped cilantro, 15 minced garlic cloves, 6 jalapenos seeded and diced, 1 tbsp. canning salt, 3/4 tsp dried red chili flakes (I skip these), and 3/4 cup red wine vinegar.  The tomatoes get peeled, seeded, and diced; the dried chilis get seeded and reconstituted for 15 minutes before pureeing.  Then you put everything in a big pot, bring it to a boil, and simmer for 10 minutes (or more, if you want it thicker).  The recipe expects you to get 6 pints out of it, and I usually do.  You can it with 1/2 headspace for 15 minutes, not at pressure.  I've made this recipe a lot; start to finish it takes me about 3 hours.

If you haven't done water bath canning before, one of the steps is, after you have finished your processing time, you turn off the heat, take off the lid, and let the jars stand in the water for 5 minutes.  I have messed this step up before (forgot to turn off the heat when I took off the lid), and that's the only batch I've had go bad: it had flat sour, which is a generally not harmful but definitely not tasty bacterial thing that can happen if you don't follow the steps correctly.  It affected every jar in the batch.  Luckily that year I had a tomato bonanza and made four batches of salsa instead of my usual three, but I also pay more attention now when I'm doing the water bath steps.

If you don't want a smoky chipotle salsa, you can use others; I made my first year's batches with ancho chilis because they were what I could find.  The next year I couldn't find them and substituted chipotles, which my husband loved, so I've kept using them.

We go through 12-15 jars of salsa a year most years, so this generally works for us.  We probably aren't saving money, but we're generally getting a lower-sodium salsa this way, and in a flavor we like.

Jelly

One of my favorite things to make and can is jelly (or jam).  Most recipes can be finished in two hours or less, and they're easy gifts.  I had a bunch of frozen blueberries, and I know several people who really like it, so I figured I would free up freezer space and knock out some Christmas gifts at the same time.

Except I didn't have as many blueberries in the freezer as I thought, whoops!  The basic blueberry jam is 9 cups of crushed berries and 6 cups of sugar.  I had about six cups.  Rather than try to math a smaller recipes (not recommended! Bad for food safety!), I found a different recipe.  I've got the Ball Blue Book, but for this I pulled out Ball's Complete Book of Home Preserving.

The recipe I used was the jam with liquid pectin; it used 4 1/2 cups of crushed berries, 7 cups of sugar, 4 tablespoons of lemon juice, and 2 pouches of liquid pectin. The benefit of this recipe was I didn't have to figure out if it was gelled enough; I am not great at it because I mostly do liquid pectin recipes. 

Blueberry jam comes out super sweet with either method, while keeping a strong blueberry flavor.

If you haven't made a jam or jelly before, they are a very easy entry into canning.  They generally aren't much more plus fruit/juice plus sugar plus maybe some extra acid (usually lemon/lime juice or vinegar) plus some pectin, depending on the fruit.  You cook it, put it in hot jars, and process according to the recipe.  They're usually a water bath process, so if pressure intimidates you, you aren't dealing with that.  You don't even need a fancy canner - just a pot deep enough to cover the jars with water and some way to elevate the jars off the bottom to get good heat circulation around the whole jar.

This blueberry jelly recipe made me 8 jars plus a little extra; if you eat a lot of peanut butter and jelly, this can be a great way to get jelly flavors you can't find anywhere else.  I have done pina colada flavor, kiwi daiquiri, and (my hands-down favorite jelly) jalapeno.  If you're looking for a new cooking skill to pick up, I definitely recommend it.

Nature Writing

I've been taking nature writing classes for a couple years at the arboretum.  I signed up initially because it's been hard to make time to write the past few years, and this would get me to do a little.

Well, next week's topic is rocks, and I've had so much to say about rock-related stuff that it's sucked all my other writing energy; I look at my list of possible Blaugust posts, and my brain can't process any of the topics into thoughts.

I've been enjoying the classes; I hadn't taken a writing class of any sort since college, and nature writing is a genre I hadn't really engaged with before.  The main side effect is that somehow I have been writing poetry sporadically for the past year, which is also not my usual form, and it's been a bit confusing, but at least some writing is happening.

It may be like when I got the new piano and I was playing so much initially that I also ended up writing three or four new pieces: music begets music, writing begets writing.

I didn't realize just how much I like rocks until this week, although the gallon pickle jar full of them probably should have been a clue. 

New bookshelves!

Right, right, so the hubris of painlessly shifting the periodicals at work has been paid for.  The new bookshelves (Billy, from Ikea) are heavier than the old ones, and assembly, placing, moving the filing cabinet because they're also an inch wider, and moving stuff where the filing cabinet had to go, and shelving all the books was... a bit much for one day.  One of the height extensions was missing a pin, so that will be remedied when it gets here, but they're otherwise done, and things are back (mostly) in LC order.  I've been getting through today on ibuprofen.