Weekend Canning

I ordered a pressure canner last week so J and I spent the day canning on Saturday, after hitting the estate sales.  We went to 5 and I found nothing, so that's two weekends in a row with nothing. 

 

We also went to the Shreveport Farmer's Market and picked up a few things (tomatoes, jalapenos and patty pan squash).

 

After getting home, we got started.  First up was 10 lbs of dried beans.  As you can see, my kitchen does get dirty, but I am a "clean as you go person" so it didn't stay like this for long.

 

We did pinto, kidney, black beans, and black-eyed peas.   We tried several variations to figure out how best to cook them.  Searching the internet isn't much help because some people soak the beans then cook, then can; some just soak and some just put dried beans in the jars.  In the end, we decided dried beans without soaking work best (for us).  So once these are all gone, we'll stick with the no soak method.    In the end, we got 53 pints and 3 half-pints.

 

We also had a few more cucumbers from the garden and did some more pickle canning.  We used a premade mix (Mrs. Wage's) and canned them like stackers.  We got 3 quarts and 1 pint.

 

This morning, we went to the Benton Farmer's Market. The last one of the year.  We got a bunch of tomatoes and ended up with 5 quarts and 1 pint.  

We may try potatoes next week in the pressure canner; we'll see.  It depends on what J wants to do since he mans the canner (he says he has to do it because I don't know what I'm doing--and that's fine because it's probably the worst job in the whole canning process).

And that was our weekend.