Summer Canning, Part 1

 Summer's bounty has spurred me into a canning frenzy.  The beautiful tomatoes in the picture above are from our garden. Many different varieties are represented in the photo -- yellow- and red-striped Red Lightning, dark mahogany Japanese Black Trifele, large egg-shaped Enchantment, green-striped Green Sausage, big red Celebrity, small egg-shaped Juliet, and many others, even some cherry tomatoes.  The mix of sizes and colors really doesn't matter as they are all blended into tomato sauce using our trusty Squeezo strainer, pictured below.  

The tomatoes go into the hopper, you turn the handle and push the tomatoes down with the mallet, seeds and skin are deposited into one bowl, and juice and pulp into another.  I added chopped fresh basil and oregano from the garden and cooked the sauce for several hours to remove the excess liquid.  The result was delicious, thick sauce that we ladled into canning jars and processed in a boiling water bath.  When I open the jars of sauce in the fall and winter, I will remember the warmth of this day, the sunlight streaming into the kitchen windows, and the bite of the tomato acid on my hands .

The canning jars above are filled with Dixie Relish, a blend of onions, peppers, cabbage, spices, sugar, and vinegar.  The onions and cabbage are from our garden.   The peppers are from Full Earth Farm, a local CSA (community supported agriculture).  This relish is so good!  We use it on hot dogs and hamburgers.  It is also a great addition to mayonnaise-based salads such as potato and macaroni.  I stumbled on it in the Ball canning book a few years ago when we had a bumper crop of cabbages and onions.  We have made it every year since.