Canning Food - How to eat well all year round and slash your grocery bill in half!

It took me a while to start canning, but once I did, I was hooked. It starts with peaches, sometime in early July when they go on sale. $4.99 per basket at the beginning of the season, when they hit $2.99 you buy up as many as you can afford (or carry:) and then it's off to work. I try to buy peaches on a Tuesday or Wednesday to let them ripen for a few days, and can them on the weekend. But, if they're ripe on a Thursday, you'll be up til midnight because a ripe peach waits for no one, and peach slices are the most delicate of fruits to preserve. Any peach that doesn't have just the right firmness goes in the jam/salsa pot. Last summer wasn't the best year for peaches, so I made a lot of jam and salsa. It's a win either way:)

Left to right: each slices, spicy peach salsa, peach compote, and caribbean peach chutney

There are two ways to can: water bath or pressure can. Jams and pickles are water bathed, where the jar is completely immersed in boiling water for 10-20 minutes. The sugar or vinegar (or a combination of both) acts as a preservative. The peaches above, as well as all the pickles below were water bathed.

Left to right: Pickled beets, yellow and purple, spicy pickled beans, dilled carrots

If you want to can a sauce, vegetable or bean without sugar or vinegar, you have to pressure can it. As opposed to water bath canning, where the jars are immersed in water, with pressure canning the jars are put in two inches of water and then the pot is pressure sealed. You let the steam build the pressure up to at least 10 lbs (higher by about half a pound for every additional 1000 feet of elevation above sea level) for the required amount of time. Whole tomatoes or chunks of pumpkin take 90 minutes, although tomato sauce and soups only take 25 minutes. Beets can be roasted, to retain their colour, and then pressure canned for instant soup!

Left to right: Pumkin, Roma Tomato Puree, Roasted Beets

It feels a bit like magic, tilting a jar and looking at its contents, as fresh as it was six months before:) Of course, it's science, not magic, and what is standing between you and spoiled food (best case; worst case, botulism) is a good seal. When the jars come out of the canner, they're sticky. I make sure to let the set by not moving them for at least half an hour for water bathed cans and several hours for pressure canned jars. Then I unscrew the top, clean off the jars and check the seal. The top indent should be concave and you should not be able to pull the seal open - a perfect vacuum. When you break the seal, weeks or months later, there should be a whoosh and pop as it opens. When in doubt, throw it out!

Left to right: Green Tomato ("Govenor's Sauce") Pickle, Roasted Eggplant, dilled cucumber relish and sweet cucumber relish

Soups are great to pressure can! I made a carrot ginger soup which I feel was a bit too much work, and too gingery (I think the flavour intensified during the canning/storage time) and next time will probably just do jars of carrots, or carrots and onions, which can easily become a pureed soup. The vegetable soup is a great way to use up everything left in your garden at the end of the summer....tomatoes, potatoes, corn, beans, peppers, carrots...very tasty!

Left to right: End of Summer Veggie Soup, Carrots and Onions, Carrot Ginger Soup, all pressure canned of course:)

While you can technically pressure can greens, I wouldn't recommend it. I tried it my first year of canning (10lbs for 90 minutes) and what came out of the canner was greeny-brown translucent slime, which I ended up throwing out. The next year, I decided to lightly blanch my greens and then freeze them in glass jars, which was the way to go! I have about 100 jars of greens in my freezer: swiss chard, spinach, kale, collard greens.

Left to right: Spinach, Collard Greens (with onions and carrots)

Between all my canned and frozen goods, along with dried beans, lentils and grains, I spend very little money on groceries in the winter. The same goes for summer, when I switch to eating greens and veggies picked fresh from my garden.

Growing food and preserving it takes time and certainly there is a learning curve, but it's worth it. It's a hobby, and also a means to becoming more self-reliant, financially independent, and healthy!