Canning venison

 We don't eat much beef. My dad, mother, and brother all hunt so the only beef we've had in the past several years was gifted to us. Our freezer is stocked with venison steaks, roasts, and burger. It is so stocked, in fact, that we've started running out of room. So when my brother got a deer on opening morning, most of the meat got canned. 

Canning meat is surprisingly easy. Take your stew meat and cut it into bite sized chunks. Fill your jars loosely to about an inch under the collar. Add about 1/2 teaspoon of salt to each jar. That's it. Add your lids and rings and pop those puppies in the canner.

Canning meat is a long process, though. It needs to sit under pressure over an hour.  Canning forces a lot of the juices out of the meat so you have broth in the jar. Dump that into a pan with some thickener and you're on your way to a delicious pan of gravy. 

Who can say no to free pears?

 We've been buying our apples from the same orchard my entire life, so we already knew the owner fairly well. More recently, we've started growing dill that he sells from his stand alongside his cucumbers. He knows us well now and a stop for apples usually includes a long conversation. 

We stopped yesterday for a quarter bushel of apples, just enough to eat fresh.  As we were leaving, Bob offered us a bushel of ripe pears. For free. Now, we had just been talking about how we didn't really need any pears this year but we'd be fools to turn away free food. Into the truck they went. 

Does it mean that we spent a couple of hours yesterday making pear sauce and the bulk of today canning, drying, and baking with pears? Sure. Do we regret it? Absolutely not.

Pizza sauce

 It's canning again at the homestead today. The garden is probably at peak right now so we are actively harvesting and processing everything we can get our hands on. Today the job was pizza sauce. We use a recipe that my Great Aunt Nellie passed to my mom when my parents were first married.

Start with tomatoes, bell peppers, hot peppers, onions, and garlic.

Chop and boil everything but the tomatoes until it's soft.

Cut the tomatoes into  manageable pieces.

Run the tomatoes and stewed vegetables through the food processor.

Dump it all into a pot with your spices and cook it down to about half. This takes a while. Like, all day basically.

Then it's a simple matter of jarring up the sauce and canning it. 

Pickled beets

 I'm a big fan of beets in nearly every form. But a special favorite is pickled beets. Our beets are ready for harvest this week, so it's the perfect time to do some pickling. 

 

the skinny ones, Cylindras, on top are the ones we'll use for pickles

 We use an old guide that my grandmother gave my mother when my parents were first married.

 

clearly, it's seen a little use

 

It's surprisingly easy to make pickled beets. First, boil your beets around 15 minutes, just long enough to loosen the skins.

Trim and slice the beets and fill your jars. 

 Then add your brine. Ours uses vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and allspice. Top with lids and close with rings. Then put them in your canner, first for 10 minutes under steam, then 15 under 5 pounds of pressure.

And that's it! 9 lovely jars of pickles for winter.

Learning canning

 Growing up, we canned vegetables every summer. If you had asked me I'd have proclaimed with confidence that I knew how to can. And now I realize that I really, really don't. So today I had my first canning lesson. We picked a small batch of green beans, enough for 14 pints, and broke them up into bite sized pieces. Then we divided the beans into jars.

Add a little salt and enough hot water to cover the beans, then top with a warmed lid.

Tighten on rings and stack them carefully in the pressure canner with water in the bottom.

Close the canner and heat it until it starts steaming. Then you add the weight. Bring it to pressure (10 pounds for beans) and cook it at pressure for 20 minutes. Then let it cool until the pressure releases and remove the jars from the canner.