Hot, Hot, Hot

     Over the past couple of days, it’s been hot, hot, hot.  So of course, that means a perfect time to can right?  (Sigh.  Yeah, I didn't think so either.)  I keep trying to confirm to myself, we no longer control our lives, but a host of other factors do.  They control the produce and therefore the produce controls us.

     Last Wednesday the canning season picked up from prolonged to hectic with the addition of 2.5 bushels of Red Haven peaches and 2.5 bushels of Summer Rambo apples from a local orchard.  Of course, there were other things from the garden that got put on hold – tomatoes to pick, zucchinis to shred and slice, and cucumbers to pickle – but I’ve come to find over the course of the last couple of years, you can’t do everything at one time, but generally August is the month you go produce crazy:

August 8, 2011 (Our First Year) What do you do with a bushel of tomatoes?  Salsa, pizza sauce and spaghetti sauce of course!  What do you do with a bushel of peaches?  Canned peaches and peach pie filling!  [All in "the canning factory" a.k.a. Mom's kitchen.] 

August 6, 2012 (Our Second Year)This week's goal: 135 lbs of tomatoes, 25 lbs of peaches and 50 lbs of apples. Also known as blind ambition (and in rare occasions, stupidity). I prefer to think of it as not starving to death. [All in a galley kitchen inside my husband's college "bachelor pad" a.k.a. a tiny apartment kitchen.] 

August 21, 2013 (Our Third Year)And of course when it rains, it pours produce as our two bushels of peaches came in the same day as the [20.25lbs of concord] grapes (and another 20 lbs of tomatoes). [Finally in our current kitchen.] 

August 19, 2014 (Our Fourth Year)Well hello another round of processing... I can't say I missed you too terribly! Happy with the prices though! Only 1.5 bushels of peaches ($10 per 1/2 bushel), 1 bushel of apples ($3 per 1/2 bushel) and 32 pounds of tomatoes ("free" from our garden) this time around. [Note: Two days before we harvested the rest of the potatoes and onions, along with the patty pan squash.]

     This year (Our Fifth Year!) it was only $5 per half bushel for peaches and $3 per half bushel for apples.  Why don’t we have our own trees to harvest from, as you can certainly tell that we well, go a little nuts with all of this canning stuff (at least our friends and relatives seem to think so)?  Well, for one, we rent and fruit trees take a while to establish themselves, so therefore we have to confirm that we will also be established here for a while too.  Two, how you dig up a fully mature tree if and when you decide to leave and easily replant it elsewhere would be an interesting question to try and answer.  And, three… expense.  If we could get them cost-effectively, we might just try it. 

      So my husband came home on Wednesday afternoon from work and transformed our kitchen into a canners’ paradise.  (Okay, if we had an air conditioner attached to us and four extra hands that don’t get tired it’d be a little more like a paradise.)  Instead, it was the beginning of another painstaking endeavor with canned goods.  We were smart and remembered that there was no way we were going to be cooking during all of this (something we usually neglect to remember... at least for say, the last four years), so I ran to a local pizza place and got two large pizzas (which turned into three for the price of two when they messed up our order) that kept us in food for the next three days.

     The first night (of 5 hours) we managed to get 28 quarts of applesauce, 9 half-pints of apple pie jam (one of my husband's experimental canned good recipes this year), and 9 pints of bread and butter pickles that were awaiting canning in the fridge.  Might as well, put them in while the canners' hot!  We were finished sometime after 11 p.m. and I may or may not have fallen asleep on the couch during the second to last canner load.  

     By Thursday, our second day, my husband got what I considered the luxury of trudging off to work bright and early in the morning, while I took the hot kitchen to continue with the peach processing.  My goal was simple: By the time he got home from work, I should have enough done to have the canner running non-stop before we collapsed into bed.  When he got home, in went peach jam, peach pie filling, peach honey butter, and then canned peaches... and then the glass quart jars started to break.  There were no cracks when I inspected them, but it just so happened that it when the last two loads of peaches for the night went into the canner, out of fourteen jars, we came up with just eleven as my husband skimmed peaches off the top of the canner and we agreed to call it a night.  

     That's when our final day kicked in: Friday.  The Mr. once again headed off to work, and I got stuck in what I then concluded was the prison known as an active and boiling hot kitchen.  It was in one word, a warzone.  Canning jars, full and empty sitting everywhere.  Peach and apple guts splattered from the stovetop to the tabletop to the floor.  A pile of dishes that could easily have been used as an embankment and a boiling hot canner to top it all off.  It was the last day though, so I could at least be happy about that.  The last day of more jars of peaches; all of which came out in one piece from the canner.  Followed by apple pie filling, peach salsa, and a much deserved long weekend (i.e. two day weekend).  

     In the end, we filled 148 jars, and got 145 that didn't crack (and unfortunately a couple that didn't seal that now need either recanned or used up that are also precariously balanced in the already overflowing fridge).  I can happily say that the shower to remove the last of the brine and syrup off of me never felt so good, and that although three days of complete pain, I made it.  We have food for the winter!  (I never have to do this again, right?  ... RIGHT?!?!?!)  

     Are we done?!  You may think so after we canned all that, but sadly (and happily) no.  There's still more to process (even with the peaches and apples).  I have two 18-quart dishpans in the fridge weighed down with the garden's tomato harvest from the last couple of days.  Then another dishpan of apples for apple butter to can and apple dumpling rollups for the freezer.  Two gallon ice cream buckets and an overflowing basket of peaches to ripen and make into peach muffins and other goodies for the freezer.  Not to mention, the two zucchinis dangling from the fridge door as they are precariously balanced in between jars and the banana box of onions that we harvested from the garden last night to put up for winter storage.  That's only what's out of the ground thus far.  There's still squash and beans, potatoes and tomatoes, peppers and corn of multiple varieties to take out of the garden, and another seemingly thousand batches of pesto to make from the herb row before I need to remove the plants to attempt to overwinter them.  It's never-ending, but in the end, we have food and we're happy.  What more could one ask for?