A few weeks ago I purchased a large bag of jalapenos for our household week of Mexican food. In going through my food reserves today (this week is Ethiopian food week), I noticed and excessive amount of aging peppers I wouldn't be able to get through. The obvious answer? Pickle them!

Since this was simply to save what I had rather than buying quantity, I got two pint jars worth of tasty jalapenos that will save me from purchasing them again for a while. I cut the peppers into disks and rinsed them thoroughly to remove many of the seeds. To each jar I added 2 crushed cloves of garlic and a heaping tablespoon of Mexican oregano. After packing the pepper wheels in the jars as much as I could, I covered them with hot brine made of white vinegar, pickling salt and water. I processed them for 20 minutes. They will be ready in two weeks. Christmas jalapenos!

Although canning is most useful done in teams and in large quantities, it can also be a great way to save what you have.

I have started looking for a permanent home for the Preservation Pals. Our awesome real estate agent saw my shelves of beautiful canned food and referred me to \Marisa McClellan, an acquaintance of his who's job was teaching preservation!

I took a look at her blog and it's excellent and highly recommend checking it out.

http://www.foodinjars.com/

I have a food scrap saving habit. Every time I chop up an onion I save the ends and the skin. The same goes for garlic peels, carrot skins, celery ends, herb stems and the list goes on. It's very simple to save items that would otherwise get composted into material that makes excellent, rich tasting stock for essentially no cost. Take your scraps and keep throwing them in a bag in the freezer (I call mine the stock pile, yes, I know) and when the bag gets full, it's time to can! Preservation Rob, my right hand man, helped me with this since it was the first time we used our new pressure canner.

The stockpile had grown so large that we had to use our water bath canner to make the actual stock. We simply dumped the whole mess in, added enough water to cover it and lots (probably about 1/3 cup) of salt. Bring it all to a boil, than lower the temp and simmer one hour.


After the simmering was done, we strained all of the veggie matter out and put it into the compost. We filled the jars as we went along once the measuring cup was filled. Jars that are being pressure canned do not need to be sterilized ahead of time, only clean and ready to go.



After all the jars were filled, lids were in place and rings screwed on, we were ready to pressure can in our new, awesome Wisconsin Foundry All American Pressure Canner. This is the best pressure canner ever. It's made in Wisconsin, has a metal to metal seal (eliminating rubber seals that wear out quickly) and is ultra safe with it's screw down wing nut design. The only drawback is that it's really heavy.

We ended up having about 9 quarts total; 7 we canned and 2 we left out for immediate use.

We canned it at 15 pounds pressure for 20 minutes.


















Everything turned out excellent. Our stock was ultra sealed with no damage.