Happy First Day of Fall

Happy First Day of fall. I say that rather sarcastically, but it is what it is!

This week we are experiencing a heat wave of sorts with temps hitting the high 20’sC. It is nice to step outside and be fooled into thinking summer is going to stay for awhile. Unfortunately what usually happens after that is one morning you wake up to -5C with heavy frost covering everything. You think that’s not too bad the daytime high is still in the teens and then whammy the next day they call for rain and you get snow. You then think oh that’s okay too it will melt by tomorrow and then it doesn’t and you bitch about the weather for the next 6 months..lol

And that is what it is like to live in Saskatchewan J

I finally used the pressure cooker/canner on Wednesday night. Mr. Pickles stayed to help me do a dry run of sorts before he went back to work. The whole time he kept saying oh I think it’s going to explode...and then laugh...what a dork. I was convinced that it was going to kill me so I wasn’t laughing a long with him.

I decided to do some 1L jars of whole tomatoes and it took me about an hour to blanch, peel and core them all. I thought I had done enough tomatoes to fill 7 jars, but ended up with enough to do 5. I had planned to pack them without liquid; however I couldn’t get the juices to fill in the gaps like the book said so I ended up packing them with boiling water. I got 10 tomatoes in each jar, but they still ended up with a lot of extra room after I processed them. So note to self more tomatoes next time.

So how did I manage using the pressure canner on my own you ask? I think it went okay. I put in the 3 quarts of water like it called for, put in my jars, put the lid on and turned up the heat. It seemed to take forever for it to start to steam. However, once it did start to steam I let it vent for 10mins like it told me to and then put on the little vent cover thing and waited for the pressure vent valve to pop. On the dry run once I put the regulator on the pressure button popped right away. When I did it on my own it took almost 30mins and I freaked out for the whole 30mins. It then took another 10mins to reach the right pressure and 10mins processing time. Then I took it off the heat and had to wait another 30mins before I could take the jars out.

So I survived, the jars survived and I think I would use it again. But here’s the thing if I would have processed these jars in a water bath canner they would have taken 90mins. With all the heating up and venting and what have ya the pressure canning process took about the same about of time. So why use the pressure canner?

In other news I am trying to  figured out this whole blogger design thing and get a picture in my header with my blog title. So if you notice things are a bit wonky bare with me as i try to figure out what to do :)