Your tomatoes sound great - Enjoy. They were processed for 40 minutes so you are fine, but for future projects where you might be processing something for less than 10 minutes, please sterilize jars in boiling water and not your oven. Again, not a concern for these tomatoes :) "Jars do not need to be sterilized before canning if they will be filled with food and processed in a boiling water bath canner for 10 minutes or more or if they will be processed in a pressure canner. Jars that will be processed in a boiling water bath canner for less than 10 minutes once filled, need to be sterilized first by boiling them in hot water for 10 minutes before they're filled. " I just printed the sterilizing guidelines yesterday for my elderly neighbor, for the opposite reason. She's canning tuna tomorrow and planned to sterilize her jars even though pressure canning. At 82, she really doesn't need the extra work - I'd admire how conscientious she is and her spirit but hate seeing her overtired.

No one should be eating ANY tuna to excess: Excerpted from the EPA website (URL: http://water.epa.gov/scitech/swguidance/fishshellfish/outreach/advice_index.cfm): "By following these three recommendations for selecting and eating fish or shellfish, women and young children will receive the benefits of eating fish and shellfish and be confident that they have reduced their exposure to the harmful effects of mercury. 1.Do not eat Shark, Swordfish, King Mackerel, or Tilefish because they contain high levels of mercury. 2.Eat up to 12 ounces (2 average meals) a week of a variety of fish and shellfish that are lower in mercury. ◦Five of the most commonly eaten fish that are low in mercury are shrimp, canned light tuna, salmon, pollock, and catfish. ◦Another commonly eaten fish, albacore ("white") tuna has more mercury than canned light tuna. So, when choosing your two meals of fish and shellfish, you may eat up to 6 ounces (one average meal) of albacore tuna per week. ....6. The advice about canned tuna is in the advisory, but what's the advice about tuna steaks? Because tuna steak generally contains higher levels of mercury than canned light tuna, when choosing your two meals of fish and shellfish, you may eat up to 6 ounces (one average meal) of tuna steak per week. 7. What if I eat more than the recommended amount of fish and shellfish in a week? One week's consumption of fish does not change the level of methylmercury in the body much at all. If you eat a lot of fish one week, you can cut back for the next week or two. Just make sure you average the recommended amount per week." From Consumer Rpts (URL: http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine-archive/2011/january/food/mercury-in-tuna/overview/index.htm) "Results from our tuna tests (canned, all kinds), conducted at an outside lab, underscore the longheld concern for those people. We found: Every sample contained measurable levels of mercury, ranging from 0.018 to 0.774 parts per million. The Food and Drug Administration can take legal action to pull products containing 1 ppm or more from the market. (It never has, according to an FDA spokesman.) The EPA compiles fish advisories when state and local governments have found high contaminant levels in certain locally caught fish. Samples of white tuna had 0.217 to 0.774 ppm of mercury and averaged 0.427 ppm. By eating 2.5 ounces of any of the tested samples, a woman of childbearing age would exceed the daily mercury intake that the EPA considers safe. Samples of light tuna had 0.018 to 0.176 ppm and averaged 0.071 ppm. At that average, a woman of childbearing age eating 2.5 ounces would get less than the EPA's limit, but for about half the tested samples, eating 5 ounces would exceed the limit. In 2006 we scrutinized the results of the FDA's tests in 2002 to 2004 of mercury levels in hundreds of samples of canned tuna. The agency's white-tuna samples averaged 0.353 ppm; light tuna, 0.118 ppm. But we found that as much as 6 percent of the FDA's light-tuna samples had at least as much mercury as the average in white tuna - in some cases more than twice as much. Given the uncertainties about the impact of occasional fetal exposure to such high levels, we urged the FDA to warn consumers about occasional spikes in mercury levels in canned light tuna. More than four years later, the FDA still hasn't issued such a warning. When we asked why, an FDA spokesman indicated that the agency had already taken the spikes into account when formulating its mercury advice. " ******************* ******************* BTW, if you think these guidelines ONLY apply to children or pregnant/nursing women, that's not true. A few years ago there was a report of an NFL football player who was trying to move to a healthier diet of less meat and lower cholesterol. As he didn't really like fish as a rule, he switched to canned tunafish. He was eating a can of tuna almost every day. After a few months he started to have numbness in his limbs (parethesia) and muscle weakness. A doctor finally diagnosed his illness, and got him on a natural detox diet. Extreme? Yes. But mercury poisoning is just as real a threat as lead poisoning. Heavy metals toxicity is something to always be aware of.

@purrus ... you have to be scrupulously clean when canning, especially tomatoes, other veggies and food you pressure can ... on tomatoes, when canning, you must cut off the blossom end {the end at the bottom, sometimes it has what is known as blossom end rot - the black part - b/c it's a fungus ... } clean means no bacteria in your canning ... make tomato sauce you boil with what you are not sure of .... enjoy what you have and take notes for next year ... get a great canning book and do reading here and on other sites ... except for an *introductory* lesson on canning apricots from a friend, i'm self-taught, too ... i love *putting food by* <http://tinyurl.com/h8ehvxk>; ... there is a new edition, but most of the reviewers wish they had kept their older edition ... both are not a bad thing, but i love my older edition ... it's a fabulous book .... take care and don't, certainly and surely DON'T GIVE UP .... darlene i should add that if you get that book, or any other that you use constantly, take it to kinkos or office depot or one of those stores and have it spiral bound ... i did that, finally, and it's much easier to use and the pages do not crack out of the middle ...

Yes you can remove it. It is exactly what you said: a post that turns into a fountain. You unscrew it from the tub. Often these are plumbed with a valve at the equipment pad so that you can turn it on or off with the valve. If that is the case, just leave the valve off and you are set. If not then you might need to get a plug to screw into the opening in the bottom of the tub.