I tried my hand at canning some tomato sauce the other day and the result was good, though the process was messier and more time consuming than necessary. I learned some good lessons for next time. Even though I have a pressure canner, not a hot water bath canner, I opted to do the hot water bath canning to start with because it's been so long since I canned anything. It was a bit awkward and intimidating. I have a very healthy respect for hot jars and boiling liquid after seeing the burns a friend from master's swimming got (who had been canning for 40 years) that kept her out of the water for a month.
I learned for next time that:
1) I don't need to sterilize all the jars and lids before filling them if I'm going to be processing them in a pressure canner or for over 10 minutes in the hot water bath. This means no lifting jars out of boiling water and makes me very happy.
2) I used the jar tongs upside down. No wonder why I melted the plastic off the handles. Smart, Jackie.
3) I need to get a circular rack to put in my canner so that I can can two rows of half-pint jars at once. That will double my capacity or halve my time in one fell swoop.
In my spare time before baby comes, I'm going to experiment with pressure canning because it's faster, and not necessarily more scary than hot water bath canning (did I mention I don't like the boiling water?) given that I already have the equipment.
In other culinary adventures, I saw a gigantic pumpkin at the grocery store yesterday and couldn't resist buying it (at about 25 cents a pound it's the cheapest vegetable I've seen in a long time). Has anyone else noticed the utter dearth of canned pumpkin on grocery store shelves this past year? Apparently there was a problem with the pumpkin crop and canned pumpkin became very scarce.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure this was supposed to be a Halloween pumpkin, not a pie pumpkin because its skin was so thick I couldn't get a knife through it. Austin offered to bleach his hatchet and attack it outside the house, but I decided to just pop the whole 15 lb monster into the oven and roast it completely uncut. An hour and a half later, I still was barely able to cut through the skin (I've never met squash skin like this before--very odd) but the insides were perfect pumpkin mash. That is definitely the easiest way I've ever cooked a squash--from now on, just cook it, don't cut it.
I was going to try my hand at pressure canning the wonderful pumpkin pureee, but it turns out that mashed pumpkin is something that is not safe even to pressure can at home. Apparently the viscosity, the water content and the acidity vary so much from pumpkin to pumpkin that safe processing times can't be determined for home operations. Interesting.
(In lieu of canning, I opted to freeze the pumpkin in ice cube trays and pressed flat in quart ziplock bags so that little bits can be broken off and used at different times without having to defrost a hulking mass of pumpkin.)
