Canning

As part of our push to have more control over our food, we decided to preserve our own food. We started with all the apples from our recent apple picking trips and the one we get from our farm share. We made a couple batches of applesauce; and it was soon clear that our freezer wasn't big enough to hold it all. So we went out and got some mason jars.

We sealed our first jars yesterday, but not of applesauce. We stopped on the way home from the store at one of our local farm stands, the one we affectionately call, "the old guy." As in: "Lets go see if the old guy has any tomatoes we could save for winter." He did. We figured we'd preserve some tomatoes and some apple sauce. We decided to start with just a few jars and it turns out that our bag of tomatoes took 11 of our 12 jars.

It took some work and a fair bit of time, but it wasn't nearly as hard as we had expected. I had this image in my mind of it being very difficult, the sort of thing that only the most hard-core home chefs would tackle. We'll see if we did it correctly, but, in the mean time, it was simple enough that we'll probably go get some more jars and do the apples next weekend.