Canning Day

It was raining really hard early today, so my mom told me, "Today would be a good day to make some salsa!"

Since we had thirteen tomatoes just sitting on the counter, I agreed. (There are no longer any tomatoes on the counter.)

We used a really simple, one pint jar recipe (which I doubled to get rid of all the tomatoes).

Recipe:
6 medium tomatoes
1/3 cup chopped onions
2 tbs. diced cilantro
1 pinch salt
3 pinches pepper
1/4 tsp. ground cumin
4 tbs. vinegar
2 tbs. bell pepper
3 oz. tomato paste (in addition to doubling all the ingredients, we quadrupled this one. That is, instead of using 3 oz., we used 12)

I sterilized three pint jars, and set up my canning bath before I did anything else. Then I got all of my cooking supplies out.

Mom bought me a set of canning supplies. I love my new toys!

Once I washed all of the veggies, Alex (my brother) and I chopped them all by hand. (Oh, I peeled the tomatoes before chopping them. I stuck them in some boiling water for about three minutes until they split then dunked them in ice water.) Mixed al the ingredients and let it simmer for about five minutes, stirring it constantly. We put the mix into jars (it made a little more than two pints), put the lids on, and dropped the full jars in the canning bath (which is just  large pot of boiling water, where the water covers the jars by about an inch.) Once it boiled, I timed it for fifteen minutes, and once that was done I removed the cans That's all it took and even with all of the cutting we had to do it only took about an hour.   Now I just have to remember to get the pickling supplies next time we go to the store. We have at least ten zucchini squash sitting on our counter waiting for me to get my hands on them.