This past Saturday, the husband and I made our annual trek north to my parents place for Canning Day. Each summer, my grandpa, dad, brother, and I grow a variety of tomatoes and peppers for the family salsa. We peel, dice, and freeze the veggies as they are grown throughout the hot months of summer. I don’t know about your garden, but it seems like in mine, tomatoes seem to ripen in batches. During the end of summer, I’m in the kitchen every few nights, blanching tomatoes and generally making a mess trying to get as much water out of them as possible before tossing things into the freezer.
Anyway. It’s all worth it, because each fall, we get together and can everything. It’s always quite the production. The day starts in the morning, de-thawing all the frozen veggies, and dicing up the 45 pounds of onions we need for the batch. Eyes burning, the windows are opened as everyone found in the house is drafted for chopping duty. Once the onions are finished and we compose ourselves, the garlic is chopped, and all the veggies are added to a giant bucket. Everything gets mixed up with a boat oar that the husband and I found a few years ago, and branded as “The Big Salsa Stick.”
Once all the ingredients are mixed up, we usually break for lunch and to psych ourselves up for the adventure ahead. Canning almost 20 gallons of salsa takes a bit of time, and the day is usually a long one. This year, my brother had the genius idea to split up the operation. Inside, dad and I heated up the salsa, sanitized the jars and lids, and filled up the jars. The husband and my brother were outside with two canners over outdoor burners. I believe the burners intended purpose was to deep fry turkeys for Thanksgiving, but they worked perfectly for boiling water to seal our mason jars.
Having two canners going at once made the time fly. Mom helped wash all the jars, and line up lids for everything. Dad and I were in the kitchen racing around trying to heat up salsa on stove, and getting jars filled in time for the outdoor crew to finish up a batch in the canner (which takes 12 minutes), freeing up space for the next round. We ended up with 132 pint-sized jars, and we left 4 quarts of fresh stuff in the fridge, un-canned. We’ll definitely be keeping tortilla chip companies in business well into 2022.
Once the jars come out of the canner, they were lined up inside to cool off and we all kept watch to make sure the lids all popped, showing the jars properly sealed. Once they are slightly cooler than lava, the tops are labeled with the year, and then the jars rest for a couple weeks before we dig in. The rest of the family popped in throughout the day to check on the progress and lay claim to their portion of salsa.
So, it’s quite the day, and we’re all pretty tired still, but it’s also a lot of fun. Our crew keeps in contact throughout the summer with updates on how many of each vegetable we’ve grown to make sure we end up with enough of everything, and there are frequent, desperate trips to every store in the state for canning supplies (which have become quite hard to find by the summer time these past few pandemic years). It’s worth it all for that perfect, fresh taste of the good stuff.
Our 2021 Salsa canned, freezers emptied (just in time to house turkeys next month), feet up, chips and fresh salsa in hand, my week ended on quite the high note. If anyone needs me, I’ll be stuffing my face and doing some research to plan out next years tomato crop. Happy gardening!
