The Law of Diminishing Returns Strikes!
If you're like us, and we're sure you are, you labor in the garden all spring and summer, looking forward to the harvest. Then, the harvest gets old!
Not that we don't love it or regret it, but putting up a bountiful harvest is a LOT of work! By the 4th or 5th week that you've stayed up until 1:30 am to be able to pull that last batch of the day out of the pressure canner and to clean up - it starts to get a little old. You need your sleep, but you love filling your store room! Eventually we all get to the point that we're just ready to be done. It's not that we don't want to do it anymore, we just want to be able to relax again. Fortunately come bottle, frost or rot - the harvest finally wanes and we can settle into our winter slumber.
Well, we're here to spice things up a bit!
Here are just a couple ideas for preserving the harvest in a little more processed way.
Seasoned Tomato Sauce
Do you still have tomatoes coming out your ears? Have you already put up 50 bottles of them so far this fall? How about making a nice Seasoned Tomato Sauce out of them and then bottling it ready to use!
For a good spaghetti sauce, you usually add ingredients that, while delicious, lower the acid levels to the unsafe zone. So unless your family's secret spaghetti sauce recipe contains several cups of red wine vinegar, it will be too low in acid to be canned in a boiling water bath.
This fantastic recipe includes onions, garlic, oregano and several other spices making it a safe and delicious sauce!
Apple Pie Filling
You've sliced them, you've sauced them, you've fed a bunch to the pigs. But the apples keep rollin' in! How about getting some of them ready for pie!
Everyone has their own special recipe for baking their delicious apple pies, so my advice would be stick to what you know if you're so inclined, or try my recipe and see how you like it! If you have never made apple pie filling, I assure you, the recipe I use has been passed down and is so good you can eat it right out of the jar! You can always go stock up on canned apple pie filling, but I think in the long run, making your own is always better and might even save you some money.
With bottles of this delicious filling, not only can you quickly get a pie going, but you'll have a special treat for the kids - just dish them up a bowl of it!
READY APN
It's National Preparedness Month and we've been enjoying celebrating it by setting up lots of fantastic Giveaways! (more on that below)
We're also getting close to releasing our first set of improved FEMA Guidelines! For National Preparedness Month, The APN initiated a project to upgrade the simple Readiness levels that FEMA presents and get them Prepper Ready!
Share your Canning Tricks and Secrets!
Do you have some tips and tricks, recipes or great experiences with Canning that you'd like to share with The APN Members? If so, we would be happy to publish them for you! Check out the "Writing for The APN" section below for details.
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