We've been canning and/or freezing food from our small garden. Asparagus, both whole spears and cut, French fries and potato soup, sliced squash, and beets in the freezer and yesterday we canned some salsa.
Yesterday, I made a jar of what they call "refrigerator Jam" or sometimes freezer jam, because you can keep it forever (almost) once it is frozen. We do not eat much jam; but occasionally we will have some on a piece of toast, or if we have a biscuit. When I make freezer jam, I use sf jello, so it does not need much sugar to sweeten it like regular jam has. The first recipe that I tried was strawberry-rhubarb, which is crazy delicious; but I have expanded out and experimented with different combinations. After I read about tomato jam, I started making that when I found cheap tomatoes, or blemished ones from the farmers market. When mixed with a little bit of fresh raspberries, and some raspberry sf jello, the jam is hard to tell from real raspberry jam. This time, I had 3 peaches that were getting too old to eat fresh, so I cut them up, and a couple of the older tomatoes that I had in the fridge, and pulsed them in the Vitamix along with the very last of a jar of strawberry jam. (It was kind of a "clean-out-the-cupboards" jam), added a little cinnamon, and cooked everything until it smelled good. Then I added the strawberry jello and stirred that in good, and put it in jars. We have one of those wide-mouth 24 oz jars, and part of a 16 oz jar; so that will keep us in jam for a while.
@Sheldon Scott , have you ever cooked tomatoes, okra, onion and celery? It's delicious. I cook it and freeze it. Next winter, I can thaw out a pack, cook a piece of pork chops or chicken and have a meal. I also like it with peanut butter on Ritz crackers for lunch.
Ummmm, beet pickles. Once in a while I get a pure craving for them. I will eat them every day for weeks.
Our best year in Missouri, my wife picked 20 gallons of Blackberries and Raspberries. They grow there by the acre, wild, overcoming even the big native grasses. Good year, that was, for Berry Wine! YUM! Frank
I had some overripe tomatoes again, so I made another jar of the refrigerator jam. This time, I only had a few frozen strawberries, but I added some pineapple along with the berries and tomatoes, and it tastes delicious. The refrigerator jam is so simple to make and does not require regular canning (which I know next to nothing about doing), and we don’t eat much jam anyway, making a quart or so at a time about the right amount for us.
We had a few black raspberries on the property in Ohio where I grew up. I assumed they were planted by the previous owner. Didn't know they grew wild. They were almost as good as blackberries.
We have picked gallons of raspberries, and my wife has made several batches of jam as well as freezing most of them for use in her smoothies over the winter. She has about two gallons of dried zucchini that she uses as seasoning and thickening for soups and stews. Our jam is always made with low-methoxyl pectin, so very little sugar is used. We took one of our freezers out of commission, as we don't need as much freezer space since the children have all moved out. She is making sweet relish to take to our SIL on our trip south, and much of the jam she has made in the past two days is going to Omaha with my son who is ending his visit with us tonight and flying back. Beans, tomatoes, peppers, peas, winter squash and corn are still coming, although we harvested and ate our biggest single sweet corn harvest in Alaska yesterday. Moose destroyed the currant harvest, and the gooseberries were damaged by sawflies. We got some cherries, which I ate, and there are tons of apples waiting to be harvested later in August or September. One son who lives in Eagle River is trying to breed black raspberries and blackberries that will survive here. They probably won't grow where we live, as we are much colder than at his house ER, but he has two plants of each surviving out of dozens he has cultivated. We'll see....
All this talk may sound like a Farmer's Market but when you start talking 'canning', you're just farmers talking. So, I say good on you. However, I get my canning down at the Grocer's Market.
Bill, I got the idea of the "Tomato stuff" as I call it from a Cajun cookbook that I have. It has a lot of gumbo recipes that are similar to my Tomato stuff.
The last, and only, thing I ever canned was blackberry jam. It was all gone almost faster than it took to prepare it, if you count picking the berries. That's just not right. Tried making persimmon jam once, but apparently picked them too green.
@Nancy Hart Persimmons are wonderful, if one knows how to use them. (I don't!). We had a number of Persimmon treesd in Missouri, but the lure of the wild blackberries, acres of them, over-ruled Persimmons! Frank