Or maybe glib was serious, but is now too embarrassed to come back to this thread after getting such dire responses. I don't think s/he was pulling our leg. I can certainly imagine a large family, maybe living a prairie-style/homesteading life, where the canning is done all at once. No, I don't think it's safe to can in such big jars, nor can I imagine having that many old two-quart jars, since they're not for sale anymore. But the method itself seems close enough that it's believable. So glib, if you're still out there, I don't imagine your mom wants to hear that current canning guidelines say no canning in two-quart jars (except juice). But I'd say one small step you can take is to be sure the tomatoes are sufficiently acidified, and maybe do those in quart jars. That's the one thing you described that seems most likely to cause sickness. As for horror stories that can't possibly be true, here's one for you. My friends used to make apple butter in a big 50-gallon pot over a fire, and open-kettle can it (they would boil the lids but nothing else). In quart jars by the way. But here's the part that raised my eyebrows...they told me that one year as they started giving away the jars over the next couple days, none of them were sealed. They realized that stacking the boxes of hot jars back up was insulating the ones on the inside, and as soon as they spread out the boxes, all the jars started pinging. So the apple butter was kept warm but not hot for days in unsealed jars. To me, follower of food safety guidelines, that sounds awful. To someone doing things the old way, it's a minor setback that was easily solved. That doesn't mean that people doing things the old way are bad people. Our job on this forum is to present the information and let people make their own decisions about risk. That's all we can do. Melissa Here is a link that might be useful: NCHFP approved methods for tomato products

Thank you for the insight sue. I sounds like some of this stress was brought on by myself since I waited until the rock was hung to finalize the measurements. In retrospect, I'm not sorry I did though, even if we suffer a delay, because I got to "sketch" all the cabinetry on the walls and actually made a few adjustments based on what I saw. We are at 5 weeks right now on our cabinet order with a target of the cabinets being done next Friday, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if that slipped a bit. I guess I need to go push a little on our GC to do things in a different order than he usually does. I believe he usually doesn't schedule the painters until all the trim and cabinetry is in. Tile comes after that because he doesn't want stain on the grout. The trades come back after that for light and plumbing fixtures. I'm sure he will work with me. This pause is just killing me. To be so close to the end, yet so far away! ;-) Thanks again for sharing your experience.

http://www.FireFox.com .. which will forward to; http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ Here is a link that might be useful: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ This post was edited by mikie on Fri, Jul 5, 13 at 13:36

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