Have fun. We will miss you.

Dawn, you are an inspiration! I have only done a few small batches of canning jelly. Did you buy your lids from Lehman's in Ohio? I actually got to shop the store a few years ago. Really cool place.

Writing mustard seed on my shopping list.

I was at Wally World early this morning buying more lids/rings/jars and low-sugar pectin. Am on my 3rd batch of Annie's Salsa now (jars in canner), and will do another batch of jam later. Not as much as you, Dawn, but it still looks my little kitchen exploded! lol Why is that jars never find their way home?

Yay! (for the Salsa)

Kim, So far, I am still alive and haven't drowned in the sea of tomato yet.

Carol, Yes, Lehman's in Ohio. You order them by the sleeve and the sleeve is filled by weight, so they do not promise you a specific number of lids. They have both the regular lids and wide-mouth. A sleeve is around 360 to 370-something lids. I am just delighted by the thought that I will not have to stop everything one day and run to the nearest store (and there are no nearby stores with canning lids...so it is a minimum of an hour round-trip) to buy lids, only to perhaps find that they are sold out. Usually once one stores sells out of canning supplies, all of them do in rapid succession, and I end up having to go 80-90 miles to the DFW metro to find what I need.

You can shop Lehman's online or from their printed catalog. I'm sure there's a lot more stuff in the store than on the website/catalog, but there's still lots of stuff to choose from. One of my favorite things from Lehman's is their oilcloth aprons. I wear one while canning in order to avoid any sort of nasty burn from steam, hot water, etc. if some sort of accident occurs while canning. I have their Grandma's lye soap in my kitchen for handwashing, and buy Grandpa's Pine Tar Soap and Shampoo for Tim because it reminds him of his dad. We're a Lehman's family, I guess, and we aren't even Amish.

Amy, After fruitlessly searching for mustard seed over the last few days, I found it at the nearest Wal-Mart, which finally had restocked after being out of it every day for well over a week. They still had 7 or 8 jars on the shelf. I greedily bought 4 of them and think that will get me through the summer. You know, it isn't high canning season yet because there's still jars in the stores. Once everyone else's gardens catch up with mine, you won't be able to find a canning jar for 50 miles around. I know this because it happens every summer. Planting early like I do means I normally get to finish canning the most important stuff before the stores start running out of canning supplies. I just bought my second big box of canning salt for this year because I'd already used up almost all of the first box.

I believe that I have enough jars on hand and, if I don't, I don't want to know about it. That would be one way to get out of canning too much salsa for Tim to give away----just run out of jars and tell him I can't find any more. Hmmm. There's an idea!

Mary, I don't know why, but it happens. Or, even worse, I stash some jars away in an out-of-the-way space as we empty them out over the months and then cannot find them again until I'm, like, getting Christmas decorations out of the attic and find big Rubbermaid tubs of jars up there, leaving me to say "so that's where I put them!"

I hope no one else cans as much as I do. I can too much. I freeze too much. I dehydrate too much. I'm trying to cut back. There is no reason to preserve 3 years of food every year. Maybe I can cut back to preserving 2 years of food every year. That way, in theory, if we ever again have a year like 2011 where nothing produces much in the outrageous heat/drought, we'll still have lots of preserved food from the previous year. It just kills me to buy jam or jelly or something because, when I do, I'm thinking to myself "I could have made this last summer. Why didn't I?" I'm the say way about buying produce. We can virtually skip the produce section of the store most of the time, but if I have to buy something, I'm always asking myself why didn't I plant that or plant more of it or preserve more of it.

It takes constant tinkering and re-arranging of the walk-in pantry (which would be plenty big enough for a non-canner) to find space to store everything. At this time of the year, just forget anything that resembles normalcy. Produce piles up everywhere, the kitchen counter constantly is filled with canning jars cooling, boxes of labels, canning supplies, the dishwasher is constantly full, and I'm traipsing in and out all day....either running to the garden to find 2 more jalapeno peppers or to the compost pile to dump the parts of fruits and veggies not canned.....and I feel like I have ADHD. There is so much to do that at times I find it hard to stay focused on the most important task and easily get sidetracked by the need to do something else that is almost important....like picking all the cucumbers before they get too big because what I really need to be doing is running tomatoes through the tomato mill. Or, vice versa.

I feel sorry for Tim and Chris when I'm canning. They come walking in the kitchen, see that my canning stuff is all over the place, and quickly back away. I'll tell them to come on in and do what they need to do, and they're always saying things like "No, I'll make a sandwich and eat lunch when you're done" (which likely would be hours and hours away) or "umm, I'll go drink water from the bathroom faucet". It is like they're afraid to come into the kitchen. Maybe they think I'll put them to work peeling onions or something.

Bon, When it comes to making salsa, I'll borrow a phrase from "A Tale of Two Cities" and just say "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...." (grin) Hooray for the salsa, for sure, but boo for all the work and time involved in making bunches of it.

Dawn

For your viewing pleasure, here's the canning pages from Lehman's. I can flip through their catalog and webpage endlessly.

Food Preservation Supplies at Lehman's of Ohio

Dawn, could you share your pickle recipe? I've found recipes, but I'd like something that's proven. I do fridge pickles now, but I'd like something I can do in a water bath.

Rebecca, What kind of pickle recipes do you want? Dill? Bread and Butter? Normal canned pickles, or fermented ones or both? Cucumber relish? Dill relish? Let me know and I'll put up some recipes.

Kim, Oh, after one season as my sous chef, I think you'd hate me. Sometimes, by the end of the season, I pretty much hate myself. lol. I swear every year by the end of the summer that I am done with canning, that I am getting too old and too easily tired out to spend my whole summer in a steamy, hot kitchen, etc. Then I go many long, cool, months of not canning and recover and get over it. By March, I'm excited about the upcoming canning season again.

I stopped the canning early today because the kitchen faces west and gets too hot. I'll start up again early in the morning. It was a pretty productive day, so I have no complaints. At least I had the good sense to stop when it started getting too hot. Our heat index outdoors hit 110. My kitchen might have felt even worse than that.

Four or five years ago I just would have worked through the late afternoon heat, but even with air conditioning, the kitchen just gets too hot and steamy for an afternoon with weather like this. I'm trying to be kinder and gentler with myself and to give myself permission to kick back, chill out, relax more and not work myself to death in the garden or the kitchen. My new attitude might be working. I have watched for years as my neighbors, who probably were in the 70s at the time, or even in their 80s, one by one gave up canning. It was always the lady of the house who got tired of the work and gave it up, and it was the non-canning husband who objected and didn't want for their wife to stop canning. I used to think I couldn't imagine giving up canning. Well, the joke is on me. I'm only in my 50s and haven't canned nearly as long as my neighbors did, and I'm already dreaming of retiring from it someday. Realistically speaking, probably not until I hit my 70s though. I am trying to make it more manageable though, but not doing too much and, especially, by not doing too much at one time.

Dawn

I don't imagine you ever quit canning till your son comes and hides all your canning stuff lol. Like gardening it's part of you. Even if it's just one batch of salsa or wild jam. Last year I was just out of sorts since I moved into camper and havent canned as much.

Edited to add

it is great to slow down and enjoy yourself more and pace yourself.

Dill, preferably a garlicky dill, fresh pack? Don't want to get into a long fermenting/rinsing/etc process. I'd like to pack the jars, fill them, process, and then be done until they're ready to eat.

Thank you!

Kim, I suppose you're right. I miss it when I'm not doing it, but I also don't want to do it all day every day all summer long. So, I'm just trying to manage it better.

Rebecca, Okay, I'll post some recipes tomorrow. I am headed for lullaby land in just a minute. My DH's alarm goes off at 4 a.m. and he sleeps right through it but it wakes me up 9 times out of 10. I have to be really tired to sleep through his alarm. I have learned the hard way that if I stay up late (late by our standards here, lol, but not late for normal people) reading or on my computer, I still wake up at 4 a.m. and then cannot function the rest of the day because I didn't get enough sleep. I am an early bird by nature so once I wake up, I am up for good. (I hate that!) In lots of ways, this is the best shift he's ever worked, except he has to get up so early. But, he works 10 hour days and has a 3 hour commute, so the day has to start early....and also end kinda late.

Dawn

Dawn, even Lehman's is out of stock on wide mouth bulk lids. LOL

Oh, that is so hysterical. I can't believe it. This thought is going to be in my head while I am canning today and it is going to make me giggle.

I still love Lehman's, but maybe you have to order the lids early like I did! : )

I think that today I'll catch up on canning all the tomatoes that are ripe, even though I have a bigger pile of not-quite-yet-ripe-enough tomatoes on the breakfast room table. The scary part isn't the tomatoes piled up in the house. It is all the ones still on the plants outdoors. That cool spell in May slowed everything down and nothing much ripened during those weeks but there was plenty of fruit that already had set, and now this heat is making everything ripen sort of all at once. I envision a rough couple of weeks trying to keep up with it all, but after that, I think the pace is likely to drop off quite a bit.

I'm glad I bought my lids when I did, and I bought the regular, not the wide mouth. Most of my jars are regular mouth, except for maybe a couple dozen wide-mouth. The only thing I've been using the wide-mouth jars for are Linda Lou's Sweet Pickle Chunks, and we eat those up so quickly that we finish one batch before another one has finished fermenting. I think the boxes of widemouth lids I have from Wal-Mart will be enough to handle the rest of the LLSPC. I have three batches fermenting now that I'll can in jars next week, and that likely will be it for this type of pickle.

I had one cucumber plant come down with bacterial wilt, and I pulled it as soon as I saw it, but you know how that goes. By the time a gardener sees the symptoms of bacterial wilt, the cucumber beetles that infected that first plant with it probably have spread it to all the cucumber plants. Yesterday I got enough cucumbers to make dill pickle spears, but I found 4 more plants in the early wilt stage that you see on the first day that bacterial wilt becomes apparent. I pulled those plants, but I bet more will show it in a day or two, so my cucumbers likely will be done by the end of the week.

I grow County Fair pickling cukes precisely because they have some tolerance of (but not complete resistance to) bacterial wilt, and often they don't get it at all. They're the only variety of pickling cukes that I know of with resistance to bacterial wilt. We haven't had all that many cucumber beetles this year either and most days I see maybe one at most, but one is all it takes if that one is carrying bacterial wilt.

I am toying with the idea of planting a new round of cucumbers for fall, but if I do, I'll plant them as far away from where I grew this year's cucumbers as possible.

Rebecca, It doesn't get much better, or much easier, than this garlicky dill pickle recipe from Epicurious.

Epiurious: Kosher Dill Pickles With Garlic

If you ever decide you want to try a fermented dill with garlic, I have a great recipe for those, and we are eating them now (not this very second).

Except for its use in Kosher Dills and Fermented Kosher Dills, I don't think I see garlic used in pickles as much as it once was. I'm not sure why. I think it has to do with food safety, but I don't remember why. Also, some people cannot handle the bluish shade that garlic can take when pickled and it makes them think the pickles must be spoiled or something. They aren't.

Dawn

Dawn, I thought I'd ask this question here, too: You are right: Our mills are almost identical. On your Roma Mill, do you use the Salsa screen for Annie's Salsa? How does the texture compare to hand cut? Is it a pretty fine cut? Do you put your peppers or onions or anything else through it, or just handchop those? My Salsa and Berry Screens are supposed to be here Wednesday. I'm very excited, and wish I'd paid attention to what I had earlier!

Mary

Dawn I was my dad's sous chef when he would could elaborate 11 course Chinese meals or BBQ parties . He loved to entertain. I can't say I loved every minute of it but I learned so much from him about cooking for others and prep work and I sure do miss it now.

I do use the salsa screen for Annie's Salsa and love it. The salsa screen gives you a semi-chunky puree. I hate to use the word puree, because it isn't really a puree. The sauce screen gives you a puree that is the exact same texture as canned tomato sauce, so I use it for tomato sauce, pasta sauce, ketchup, bar-b-q sauce, etc.

The salsa screen gives you something thicker than puree with bigger chunks, but I hate to call it chunky because it really isn't chunky either. It is just bigger pieces of tomato in something that is too semi-chunky to be considered a puree. It is a finer cut than handcut, but I've used it for so long---since around 2008, that I have forgotten what salsa looks like if made from all hand-cut tomatoes.

If I am making one batch of Annie's salsa, I usually cut the onions, sweet peppers and jalapeno peppers by hand. If I am making multiple batches in one day, I switch to the food processor and cut huge mounds of onions and sweet peppers, and a smaller mound of jalapenos (or serranos if I am subbing in some serranos for part of the jalapenos to get a hotter salsa) first before I do anything else. Then, I measure out the onions, sweet peppers and jalapenos into gallon zip lock bags, essentially creating a pre-mix of those three veggies that I'll add to tomatoes and the other ingredients one batch at a time. It is a huge time saver, and allows me to get all that chopping out of the way, put the food processer washable parts in the dishwasher, and put away the food processor to keep the counters clear. I have a little herb mill I use to cut up the cilantro in big batches that I can measure out and dump into the previously mentioned pre-mix of veggies, and I do all the garlic at once using a garlic press.

If I work really hard in the morning and nothing interferes, I can quickly cut up all the veggies and herbs for up to 4 or 5 batches of salsa in the morning, and then cook/can the salsa in the afternoon. Or, I can do all the chopping and cutting in the evening, and get up and can first thing in the morning. When I do this, I call it speed canning and the one rule my family knows about speed canning is that everyone needs to stay out of my way when I'm speed canning because if they come into the kitchen during that time, I am likely to put them right to work. In the early years here, I cut up and chopped and minced each batch individually as I went along, so when one batch went into the canner, I started processing all the veggies and herbs for the next batch. That seems much slower to me than the speed canning method I use now. I like that I can run all the tomatoes through the mill and be done with it for the day. I like that I can then do the same with everything cut up by the food processor, herb mill and garlic press. I do run through a lot of zip lock bags when doing prep for speed processing, but I can turn them inside out and wash them and reuse them. My favorite thing is merely that once all the chopping and such is done, then all those machines and tools are out of the way and I have all the kitchen counter space available just for the canning part of the process.

You have to find what works for you. The method I described is what works for me. Because I grow so many tomatoes and because our plants' spring productive period generally is cut short when the June heat sets in and stops fruitset, I find myself processing huge amounts of tomatoes in the main salsa canning period which normally starts around mid-June and can run through sometime in July. It is almost too much to do in that time frame, but the tomatoes are ripe when they're ripe, so I just deal with it. Once I've made all the salsa I want to make, I switch to making sauce, catsup, bar-b-que sauce, chili base, a veggie juice similar to V-8 juice, etc. During the same time frame I'm making salsa, I often am dehydrating excess bite-sized tomatoes to save for winter snacks and salads, and am freezing excess tomatoes (sometimes whole, sometimes run through the salsa screen for tomatoes to use in cooking in the winter). It always is a relief to finish the main crop of tomatoes. When that day arrives, I pull out about 90% of the tomato plants, leaving a few to provide us with tomatoes for fresh eating for the rest of the summer. It would kill me if I had to keep up that pace of canning all summer long.

The biggest trick is just getting the tomatoes, onions, sweet peppers and hot peppers all to be ready for canning at the same time. Sometimes the sweet peppers are lagging behind all the others. When that happens, I just buy sweet bell peppers in bulk so I don't have to postpone salsa making endlessly.

While our canning talk has been focused on tomatoes, let's not forget that everything else is maturing at the same time, so I'm usually squeezing in husking and processing corn at the same time, along with picking fruit and processing it, and harvesting snap beans and dealing with them. At least potatoes and onions will sit in a cool room and wait until I can find time to process them. My summer squash was planted (probably in too much shade) at the west end of the garden this year and has been slow to grow, so I'm just now getting enough squash to process. June and July is harvest/processing insanity time and I'm always relieved when it is over. I do not regret that I have a large food processing garden, but there are days I wonder if I've lost my mind. I have wondered what summer would be like if there was no harvest at all to process, and I cannot even picture it. Well, in 2011 there wasn't much of a harvest to process due to the exceptional drought and extreme heat, but we were at fires day and night virtually every day, so I didn't even have time to think about the food that I wasn't processing. That's one reason I try to process 2 years of food every single year. That gives us a big reserve of preserved food to get us through year 2 if any crop in the garden fails in year 2.

It just kills me to have to buy produce at the grocery store if it is something we can grow here and preserve. I'd much rather have our own produce, picked and then processed right here at the peak of perfection, or (of course) eaten fresh within a day or two of being harvested. I make my meal plans for the day after doing the morning harvesting, and wouldn't want to live any other way.

Sometimes I think that Tim forgets how much money the garden saves us on buying fresh, organic produce, so I drag him to Central Market down in Southlake, TX, after we leave CostCo and I make sure he notices the eye-popping prices of fresh, organic produce. He goes home with a brand new appreciation for all that the garden produces for us, and he also doesn't mind buying organic lettuce or whatever in the summer because he understands what we can and cannot grow here in the heat. He appreciates organic produce more than he used to because he has learned how hard it can be to grow organically.

I cannot imagine our lives without the garden, but every now and then I'd like to have a day where nothing is waiting to be harvested or to be washed, sorted, blanched, cooked, canned, frozen, fermented or dehydrated. I do stay very busy in the main harvesting/canning season, but I have days I just want to be lazy and do nothing. However, what I have found is that when the lazy urge strikes, after a couple of ours of laziness, my conscience gets the better of me and I get up and to into the kitchen and deal with the waiting produce.

Our first southern peas now are 3 or 4 days from harvesting and I am excited, even though that means I am about to start in on the endless routine of shelling peas. I love it even though it is time-consuming. To me, nothing says summer like sitting with a big bowl of purple hull peas and shelling them. Then, if I have enough purple hulls, I make purple hull pea jelly. And, of course, we get to eat purple hull peas for weeks and weeks and weeks in the summer, and I put up and freeze the rest. I also planted a long row of lima beans this spring, and they are flowering now, though I don't know if they've set any beans yet. I just kind of run right past them every day to get to the tomatoes.

I don't even have to look at the calendar in summer, and neither does anyone else in my family. We can tell, at the very least, what month it is by what produce is piling up in the kitchen. I kinda love that, though there's days I also hate it.

I was normal when we moved here in 1999 and was perfectly happy if the garden produced just enough for us to eat fresh and give away the excess. Over the years, though, as the soil improved and our yields improved, I realized that I could preserve huge amounts of food if I tried. So, I do. I grew up with a father who gardened and canned, and with many relatives who did the same, so putting food by was nothing new to me. It is just that when we lived in town on a relatively shady lot, I couldn't grow enough of anything to have much excess left over after fresh eating. Now, we have endless sun and endless space and I grow too much of everything. My attitude is that too much is good.

Dawn

Dawn, what an excellent instructive post. I don't know how to save things here, but as soon as I type this, I'm going to try to save your response. You detailed everything perfectly and it made complete sense to me. I laughed, because I didn't know other people washed their baggies;) I don't every time, but I do a lot of times. You had mentioned in another post that you have a galley kitchen. So do I, and when I'm doing what little canning I do, I have to clear stuff away, and get everything organized, so what you've detailed makes perfect sense to me. With all you have going on canning, freezing, dehydrating, etc, you HAVE to be organized or you'd never get it done. You have a talent, obviously. Thank you so much.

Mary

I say this every year, but Dawn is the energizer bunny.