Canning

I made a sauce with multiple veggies from my garden.  The sauce includes parsley, oregano, and basil from my herb garden.  The vegetables are Roma Tomatoes, mariachi pepper, yellow peppers, onions, yellow squash, and eggplants.  The eggplants are my favorite next to pumpkins to watch grow.

I cooked everything down.........

Then bottled them using my pressure cooker.  It smelled so good!
I've also made.......

Cinnamon apples.......and..

Salsa...super spicy.  This year was not very productive when it came to tomatoes, but peppers were a different story.  As of now I still have habaneros which are turning a lovely orange, jalapenos, and two types of sweet peppers.  Growing peppers is so much fun and there are so many different varieties.  For this recipe I only used Jalapenos but to keep that nice spicy kick I left the seeds in.

The smell coming from these chopped up jalapenos was amazingly fresh!  As you can see one of my jalapenos had turned red.....I am letting the rest on the plant turn red but for the purpose of salsa I wanted them green so there would be a contrast in color with the tomatoes.

Since I did not have much success with tomatoes I used all of the tomatoes I could gather from my garden rather then use just one variety.  In this salsa there are Roma, Zebra stripped, and yellow pear tomatoes.  Before adding the tomatoes to my Salsa I needed to take the skin off.  This is easily done by blanching.  I put the tomatoes in boiling water for 30-60 seconds, or until the skin starts to split.  Then the Tomatoes are quickly dumped into an ice bath so they stop cooking.

I was then able to easily slip the skin off of each tomato.  Some of the tomato's skin had not split so I just lightly punctured the skin with a knife and then was able to easily slip off the skin.  I added all of the ingredients into a huge sauce pan and let it boil down for about 30 minutes.  While that was cooking I prepared my half pints for bottling by cleaning them and pouring hot water in them.  I did this so that the boiling hot salsa would not crack the glass when I poured it in.  When the salsa was done I filled the bottles with salsa leaving about an inch of head space (when stuff is heated up it expands).  Then I placed them in my canner, and filled it with water until the bottles were completely covered.  Once the water started to boil I processed the salsa for about 20 minutes.  The first thing I used my salsa on was a breakfast burrito mmm...... so good!