Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Canning in Minnesota

I learned how to can this weekend! Calhoun and I went up north to his parent's house this weekend and the weather was BEAUTIFUL! It was sunny, breezy and about mid seventies during the day. It ended up being great canning weather, so Bemidji and I had an afternoon adventure canning tomato juice!

Canning requires a lot of tomatoes. Good thing Bemidji's garden has had a great summer, we blanched and peeled fifteen pounds of garden tomatoes with pounds left over.

Tomatoes from the garden

blanched tomatoes

almost fifteen pounds!

Next, we cooked the tomatoes along a handful of other ingredients to make tomato juice.

Bemidji's tomato juice recipe. She got it from her sister who got it from Cuisine Magazine. 
Some modifications have been made.

Cooking - it smells better than it looks 

After cooking, we had to strain the ingredients so that the texture was actually juice like.

The juicer - who knew canning tomato juice required so much equipment?

Finally, we poured the juice into the jars


Sealed the jars and boiled them for fifteen minutes...


I successfully canned for the first time EVER!


 Although writing this now makes the process seem simple, it took us over two and a half hours to complete the whole process but Calhoun and I brought home seven pints of tomato juice - we'll be hosting blood mary's sometime soon :)

3 comments:

  1. How fun!! Just FYI - I LOVE bloody mary's :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm glad you ladies like it! This is part of my motivation for hosting something during the marathon :)

    ReplyDelete