Happy summer! What a wonderful, fresh and healthy time of year. My family loves living out of our garden while it is in its peak season of goodness. Fresh fruits and vegetables in abundance is heaven on earth to me. This is the season to live on simple garden meals. A big pot of steamed new potatoes, beets, zucchini, green beans etc. and fresh picked vegetables and salads — yum yum!
Those simple meals are a must when we spend the day canning, jamming and preserving our garden bounty.
Canning, freezing, jamming, fermenting and dehydrating has been a part of me my entire life. I was blessed to have my mother, Anita, and grandmother, Evagene, teaching me as we all worked together. We had loads of fun preserving food for the winter months ahead. And we always looked forward to harvesting vegetables from the gardens and going to the orchards to pick peaches, nectarines, cherries, apricots, blueberries and more to freeze, jam, can and dehydrate.
In those days, we would often travel 100 miles or so to go pick fruit. It was a family affair to go fruit picking; it meant a day of visiting, picnicking and trying to get more fruit into the buckets than our tummies! We usually came home with a van load of delicious fruit to enjoy over the next year. The next few days of preserving were equally fun as we all worked together. Now, I get to carry the traditions on with my own family as my children enjoy learning and working together. Of course it is even simpler now as the Azure orchards and gardens are brimming with luscious organic fruits and vegetables that can be ordered and delivered to our door. What a blessing!
I would like to share with you some basic preserving methods and recipes that we have always enjoyed. These are just basic guidelines for those of you new to the natural way of preserving. Everything is very flexible, so you can adjust the sweetness and flavors to your family’s tastes. Gather your family around you, have fun together planting, weeding, harvesting and preserving! It's homemade preserved food that will be twice as nutritious and delicious as any prepackaged foods you can buy.
Basic Guidelines to Canning Fruit
I’m just going to cover the basics here. For a complete “how to” of the actual canning process, look it up online or in a Ball/Kerr canning book. Or read up on the process here.
♦ Prepare fruit and pack firmly into jars filling the fruit to the neck of the jar about half an inch from the top. (Note: For really full flavor on apricots, remember to toss about a dozen pits in with the fruit; it makes a huge difference!)
♦ To prepare the syrup, simply combine honey and water. I usually make my largest soup kettle full of honey water so I have plenty for several canning loads. The basic recipe for honey water is: 3 or 4 parts water to 1 part honey depending on what kind of fruit I am canning. For mild delicious honey water that does not domineer the fruit flavor, it is important to use clover honey (SW011). For apricots, peaches and nectarines, we use 3 cups of water to 1 cup of honey. For cherries, pears and very sweet peaches, we use 4 cups of water to 1 cup of honey. You can adjust this according to you family’s preference of sweetness.
♦ Heat the honey and water together in your kettle until hot and well-combined into a nice syrup. Ladle the honey water syrup over the packed fruit in your jars, covering fruit and filling to ¼-inch from the top of the jars. It usually takes 1 ½ to 2 cups of honey water per quart jar of fruit depending on how tightly the fruit is packed. Gently poke a knife around the edges to release any air bubbles. With a clean damp cloth, wipe the rim and place the rinsed canning lids on jars screwing rings firmly but not tight.
♦ Place jars in your canner on the rack. Cover the jars with warm water and bring to a good rolling boil over high heat. It is not necessary to boil for a long time like the books say. It will usually seal and keep for a few years with just a good rolling boil. Lift the jars out using a jar lifter (HA082), and place hot jars on newspapers or a towel. When jars are completely cooled (usually by the next day), I remove the rings and gently wash away any stickiness from the outsides of the jars before storing in my basement. (Do not worry if some hot syrup has seeped out the sides of the lids; it is from boiling too hard, or from being too full, but it will usually seal.)
If you are new to canning with honey, you will be delighted at how delicious this fruit is!
How to Make Homemade Jam
I love to make jam! To me it is the most fun of all preserving projects because there are endless kinds of jams to make. It is interesting to see how different your jam tastes if the fruit is ground versus chopped, if you add water or not, and if you use the calcium water for jelling help or not. For me, the experimenting never ends.
The two basic methods are freezer jams and canned jams. The very best freezer jams are strawberry and raspberry. Both are so fresh tasting that in the winter you eat them and feel like you are tasting summer. It is our family’s favorite. For canned jams, there are as many kinds as you can dream of. You can play around with mixing fruits, grinding them or chopping them, thick or thin. If you like a solid smooth texture, then blend up your fruit. Or if you like chunks of fruit with thick fruity syrup around it, then chop your fruit and add some water as part of your measured liquid (this is our favorite way).
Below are two recipes that my family enjoys. But I also highly recommend Pomona's Pectin (BP060); I use this for all of my jam making. They have a lot of wonderful recipes in their pectin package, but I usually use those recipes as my guideline. All of their recipes are honey or fruit-juice sweetened. If you plan to do a lot of jam making, you will want to order the 1-lb bag of pectin (BP053) as it disappears fast. It will keep for years if you don’t use it up in a season. Of course, whatever leftover pectin you have can be used as a thickening agent for the filling in fresh fruit pies or glazes.
Try these homemade jam recipes: Cherry Jam Recipe and Strawberry Freezer Jam Recipe
Blanching and Freezing Vegetables
I highly recommend freezing vegetables above canning them. First, it is simpler, delicious and is far higher in nutrient value. Freezer space can be a problem, but for us it was a priority to get a couple more freezers to hold all the home frozen fruits and vegetables.
Blanching is a controversial subject. Some say it kills more vitamins by boiling the vegetables. Others say quite the opposite. Here is a quote from an article I read: “It is very important to blanch vegetables before freezing them. It stops the enzymes that keep vegetables ripening, helps get rid of dirt and bacteria, brightens the color, and slows vitamin and mineral loss." Sounds good to me.
To blanch vegetables, bring a large pot of water to a boil (use about 1 gallon of water per pound of vegetables). Add the vegetables to the water. Once the water returns to a boil, cook the vegetables 1 to 2 minutes. Remove the vegetables from the boiling water and transfer them immediately to a bowl of ice water until they are completely cooled. (Learn more about freezing and blanching vegetables and fruits here.)
Whichever method of freezing you choose, I am sure it will be far more nutritious than canned. We personally prefer to blanch asparagus, green beans and corn. For the corn, you will want to blanch it on the cob. After it is cool you can wrap it up tight and enjoy corn on the cob in the winter, or cut it off of the cob and store in freezer bags. I don't blanch all the other vegetables that I freeze such as peas, grated zucchini, chopped peppers, chopped tomatoes and minced herbs.
All the vegetables can be spread out on cookie sheets and frozen, then packed into your freezer bags for a loose-pack style, or simply fill your quart or gallon bags and freeze according to your family size. I freeze all my berries, peaches and some rhubarb etc. in the same way. Fortunately fruit doesn't need to be blanched.
Enjoy the fresh taste of frozen vegetables and fruit all winter long.
How to Pickle Cucumbers
Making pickles is a true joy, and my girls love packing the cucumbers, garlic, green beans etc. into the jars for dill pickles. Even though my girls are young, they have been doing all the cucumber washing and jar packing the last few years. It is always fun to see their pride and joy at accomplishing a task.
With pickling, there are a few methods that we like doing. There is the classic dill pickle, which is canned, and there is the old-world style of fermenting as my great-grandmother from Germany always made. I encourage you to try both because both are equally good. We also like to make the sweet bread-and-butter style pickles and relish. Both of these recipes are raw, crisp and so delicious. The amazing thing is that they keep raw in the fridge up to a year and keep their crisp freshness the whole time. In 2012, I ran out of pickles and relish, so I ordered the greenhouse cucumbers (QP141), green cabbage (QP050) and onions (QP018). I made relish and bread-and-butter pickles in the spring. Oh, how wonderful to have this fresh produce available year-round!