Looking at Friday’s blog, I realized I probably didn’t explain very well the monster and why it makes it annual visits to our kitchen. We do a lot of canning from our garden. The first vegetables ready are the tomatillos in August, the small green Mexican tomatoes used to make salsa verde. After that, we can tomatoes coulis, apple sauce, and sometimes dishes like ratatouille. Basically, we stick anything in a jar that grows in such an abundant that we couldn’t eat it all at once. The canning jars are washed, filled, and equipped with a rubber ring that doesn’t allow any air to pass. Then they go into that giant pot (aka ‘the monster’) that sits on my stove; that’s the sterilizer. A large soup pot could be used too, but the size of the sterilizer lets us do a lot at once and is made to hold the jars tightly so they don’t bounce around doing the vigorous sterilizing process. To sterilize the jars, the water is boiled for two hours (getting to this temperature takes some time too) and then again for 90 minutes 24 hour later. We can when the vegetables are fresh, which often means in August, the hottest month of the year.
Why do we do this? For the same reason we garden: because we like to eat well. There’s nothing like opening a jar of homemade tomato sauce in the middle of a dismal January evening. At that point, sweating our butts off in a dripping wet kitchen is just a memory and it’s far better than anything store bought. And, not that I always feel this way in August as the sweat rolls down my back and I still have hours of work in front of me, but I really like it too.
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