I’ve at last got a proper amount of canning in my larder! Given the dearth of apples, blackberries, and plums this year, I didn’t get to make any new jam or apple butter; fortunately, I still have a lot from previous years as you can see. The two quart jars are mincemeat; as I wrote before, I had plenty of green tomatoes, and by shaking limbs and climbing a ladder I was just barely able to scrounge enough apples to try the recipe again. And this time was a success; I found that two pounds of green tomatoes and two pounds of peeled, cored apples were the right proportions to make two quarts, one for each pie I plan to make this year (Thanksgiving and Christmas). Chekhov and I are the only ones around here who like mincemeat pie, so that’s plenty. Now, pumpkin pie is much more popular, and as you can see I got six pints of that from my Halloween pumpkin (after working out a new method of rendering that got me through the process much more quickly and easily than in the past). I thought I was done canning for the year, but when Chekhov and Yellowbird came for my birthday they brought five pounds more tomatoes (a mixture of red, yellow, and green). So after buying another case of Mason jars, that gave me five more jars of salsa (two rows to the right of the pumpkin); we recently opened one of the first jars and were happy to discover it got better as it aged! Given that we go through a lot of salsa here, that’ll all be gone by next autumn, but the recipe is easy and I’m sure we’ll have plenty of tomatoes again!
