Preserving Food 2011: Canning, Freezing, and Dehydrating

We have had an extra busy fall. Kelsi started graduate school in September and I am still in nursing school. We haven't had a lot of extra time for the blog. Our free time was spent harvesting the garden and getting it ready for winter. We preserved more food this year than ever before. Here is last years canning as a comparison. 

This entry is not only to share with you guys how much we have done, but to document and compare with for next year. We doubled our canning from last year. 

Crushed Tomatoes: 19quarts left. 10 already eaten!

Pickled cucumber chunks: 3 quarts. These make a great addition to any sandwich!

Spicy pickles: 14 quarts

Extra Spicy Pickles: 8 Quarts

25 total quarts of pickles

Peaches: 29 quarts

Apple Pie Filing: 4 quarts. 4 already eaten

Applesauce: 9 quarts. 2 eaten. NOTE TO SELF: should have done more of these.

Cherry Pie Filling: 5 quarts. 2 eaten

Pears: 9 quarts

Spicy Salsa: 14 Pints

Garden Salsa: 16 pints

Assorted jams/jellies: 26 half pints.

Pesto cubes: 2 bags. You can just add these to your noodles and you have instant pesto noodles. Tastes great too!

Peas

More peas.

Lots of beans: Bags and bags full.

3-12oz jars of dehydrated tomatoes and a 1 quart bowel.

Apple fruit leather. It doesn't look like a lot, but each container is 1.75 quarts

I had to play around with the consistency of the mixture so each batch turned out a little different. One batch was more like apple bark, but they all taste really good!

We also have 11 loafs of zucchini bread in the freezer made by Kelsi.

Hopefully we can double our canning again next year.

Thanks for reading!

Itty Bitty Little Tomatoes.

We are loaded with cherry sized tomatoes right now. Every 3-4 days we pick another large bowl full.

We had more than we can eat and we don't want them to go bad. Tomatoes this small are a pain to can because they have to be peeled, so that's not a fun option. What we are left with is fresh salsa or dehydrating. We have already made some salsa, so we started drying them.

5 dehydrator trays produced 4 cups of dried tomatoes.

I picked another large bowl yesterday.

Today the dehydrator is loaded again today and will give us 4 more cups of dried goodness. 

These tomatoes are a great thing to have in the cupboard. You can add them to pastas or pizza and they will plump up a bit. Or drop them in the food processor with a little water and you can make your own tomato paste for spaghetti night.

Thanks for reading!

Preserving Food: Peas

We picked 2gallons of peas the other day.

The peas with good shells were frozen whole.

The peas with bad looking shells were shelled and frozen.

Not a lot of food for all that work! But it'll be delicious!