People are not supposed to can anything involving oils, dairy, or eggs. These items can only be canned by commercial canneries that used ultra high temps to keep spoilage down, as well as preservatives not available to most home canners. Whe I can tomato sauces, I don't add any oils or fats of any kind. Once the jar is open, then you can add what you like as far as oils. For soups, its the same, and these must be pressure canned and still cannot contain oils. There is a post here where someone sauteed onions in a spritz of Pam spray using a non stick pan.

Welcome to the Harvest Forum. It's a little slow right now, but wait until produce starts coming in!! I can answer some of your questions and I'm sure others will be along with more ideas. 1. I cut the kernels off corn cobs with my electric knife (after blanching). Stand the ear on the stem end in a bundt or angel food cake pan and slice away. The kernels fall right into the pan. 2. Haven't grown bushel cukes. 3. Don't do French Onion Soup. 4. You can freeze the peppers after roasting and peeling for use all winter. I don't usually do bell peppers, but I do roast, peel and freeze Anaheims to use in recipes calling for mild green chilis. 5. I eat the garlic in my dill pickles too! I have pickled garlic alone and for us, it's mostly a snack or a way to preserve some of our garlic for later use in cooked dishes (you don't really taste the vinegar). 6. Let's see...I can my peaches (peeled and sliced or halved). They can be used however I want later. I have canned apple slices (peeled, cored and sliced), but they get rather soft. I have dehydrated apple slices and have frozen them raw (quick dip in Fruit Fresh to help prevent browning). We don't eat much pie, so I prefer to just preserve the plain fruit and decide later how I want to use it. 7. Not sure what kind of marinade you're wanting to use to marinate your tomatoes so this is hard to answer. You can sprinkle on herbs, salt, pepper, lemon juice, vinegar prior to drying. Other: Do you have a copy of the Ball Blue Book (often referred to as BBB)? Great source of info and recipes. Small Batch Preserving is another good one. Here's link to the National Center for Home Food Preservation. The information here is reliable and up to date as far as safety. Hope to see more of you around here!!! Deanna (Pacific Northwest) Here is a link that might be useful: NCHFP

Is this ok? Not really. The general guideline is that jars go into the canner HOT so you only fill enough jars for for the canner load. The rest of the food remains warm in the pot until you are ready to reheat it and then fill the rest of the jars. This is a little less of a safety issue with pickled foods than with other things because of the acidity of them from all the vinegar. But even then the jars have cooled on the counter so it would take longer processing times to bring them back up to full heat level. So "technically" your last two jars were under-processed. I'm not saying they are unsafe just that you need to correct the way you do it in the future. I assume you used an approved recipe for making this so it has plenty of vinegar? Dave

greenhouser, My little sister told me the other day that she and her husband always joke that if there's a national emergency and society breaks down, they're coming to stay with me, because I have a pantry full of canned goods and my husband has a full workshop and is very hand. My friends call me "farmer Zabby." This is hilarious to me because compared to so many of my canning buddies on this site I'm a total dilletante---I can for fun, stuff that I like to grow & make more than staples, don't even have a pressure canner, etc. I sometimes buy meat and freeze it if it's on a good sale, but Annie would die laughing if she saw me try to catch a hog (let alone butcher one), and as I always say, if we actually had to eat on ONLY what I canned, we'd be very skinny indeed! And I sure wouldn't insult any of the REAL farmers in my rural area by even jokingly calling myself "Farmer Zabby" in their hearing. But it's all relative. I come from a long line of urban dwellers (even my grandmother wasn't much of a cook, and canned only during the war out of necessity). So the fact that I grew & canned enough tomato products to meet our needs all year long even when I lived in downtown Toronto on the streetcar line makes me pretty eccentric in my crowd! Back to storage---my pantry holds just about as much as I seem to be up for canning most years. If I expand my efforts, I'll have to evict the washer & dryer from there eventually (it doubles as a laundry room). Or start eying hubby's office closet, like some of the rest of you.... ;-) Z