Tomato Apple Chutney review

I am a fairly prolific canner (and really bad about turning it into a profitable hobby, I keep getting worried about the legalities of selling food), but rarely do I actually sit down and remind myself of what worked and what didn't. So I'm going to try adding /that/ to this rambling collection of posts and prove myself to have the focus of SQUIRREL!

Anyhow, I don't remember where I got this recipe from, apparently I didnt immortalize it in the blog. My guess is out of the magic Bernardin book which I did most of my canning out of last year. If you can't read the label on the lid, it's Tomato Apple Chutney.

And it's pretty sad. It's sweet and not much beyond sweet, a touch of vinegar sour, and nothing else of interest. Mixed with fairly flavourful sausage, it's a nice sweet touch, but I'm on the hunt for how to fix it rather than looking forward to having many more jars of it. I'm thinking of using it in cake (my favourite way to use up weird sweet stuff I don't know how to hide.. quick bread!).

I'll probably do other reviews of my various canning things, if for no other reason than to remind myself what I shouldn't do again next year.

Carrot Cake Jam

This is what got me started canning. About 14 years ago, a copy of this recipe ran in the local free newspaper, and I thought 'damn, I can do that'. It wasn't a complete recipe, it left off the details of how to process the jars, but I found that info somewhere else. It just sounded too good not to try.

Not quite like that, but it tastes quite like that. It looks more like this.

All photos were pilfered from flickr, under creative commons.

Carrot Cake Jam

1 1/2 cups finely grated carrots
1 1/2 cups chopped cored pears
1 3/4 cups canned pineapple, including juice
3 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1 package powdered pectin
6 1/2 cups sugar

In a large saucepan, combine carrots, pears, pineapple and juices and spices. Bring to a boil, stirring frequently. Reduce heat, cover and boil gently for 20 mins, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat, and whisk in pectin until dissolved. Bring back up to the boil and then add the sugar all at once and return to a full rolling boil. Boil hard, stirring constantly for 1 minute. Remove from heat and skim off any foam. (Or not, I dont mind the foam, some people are fussy about looks.)

Ladle into hot jars, leaving 1/4" headspace. Cap and process in boiling water for 10 minutes.

Makes approx 6 250 ml jars.

A word to the wise...

When you are making very very hot pepper jelly, do not let it boil over. Do. Not. The smell of burning sugar and excessively hot peppers is just /evil/. Oh yes, and even if jalapenos dont phase your bare hands, the much hotter red peppers from a friend's garden will make you wish you'd worn gloves. Ow.

Evil.

Today's canning was a 'oh crap, I have to can these because they are getting sad' day.

Firey Pepper Jelly

As many sizzling red hot peppers as you happen to have. I had about 50g. By rights the recipe called for 175g of jalapeno peppers, but as these ones were hot enough to want to peel my skin off, I decided it was good enough. And 2 jalapenos came along for the ride.

Seeds in a spice bag.

1 c cider vinegar
3 c sugar
1 pouch liquid pectin

Take the vinegar and the peppers and blend/puree (blender or food processor) until liquid. Add sugar and seeds into pot and boil for about 10 mins. Add pectin, stir and boil hard for another minute. Jar up with 1/4" headspace and process for 10 mins. Wish you'd remembered gloves. Makes approx 7 125 ml jars.

Plum Chutney

8 c chopped blue plums
1 1/2 c brown sugar
1 1/2 c vinegar
1 c raisins
1/2 c chopped onion
1 T mustard seeds
2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp salt

Mix all together. Simmer until thick enough to mound on a spoon, about 30 - 45 mins. Jar up with 1/2" headspace and process for 15 mins. Lament that you think you put a bit too much vinegar in. (It did splash when I was measuring. Ah well) Makes approx 12 125 ml jars and 2 250 ml jars.

Leftover pickles

There was at the house on the weekend a party. This party resulted in lovely fresh veggies and dips and salads and all sorts of lovely summery edibles. I also opened up the zucchini, beans and asparagus pickles from earlier in the summer. The beans and asparagus were very sharp, to my mind, the zucchini were very nice. As best as my notes read, all three got the same brine so who knows.

There was also leftovers (not of the homemade pickles!). A lot of leftover veggies. Celery, beans and sweet peppers to be precise. Neither of us much like celery, only I like beans and while we both like sweet peppers, six seemed excessive no matter that four had been claimed for lunches. Oh yes.. and leftover plums and grapes at the stage of now or compost. Now it was.

But pickles make everything better.

Fruit Pickles

Grapes are a fridge pickle. Plums I decided to process. Both of the fruits got the same treatment. Raw pack, brine poured over and then processed or fridged.

Fruit Brine

2 c cider vinegar
2 c sugar
1 tsp kosher salt

Mix and boil. Pour over raw packed fruit.

In the 500ml jar with the fruit went 2 small cinnamon sticks, 4 peppercorns, 4 cloves and 2 all spice berries. Process for 10 min.

Veggies!

Leftover Veggie pickles

As usual they're raw packed with spices, and then brined and processed. 500 ml jars, and into each one went:

A few red pepper strips
A jar length of green onion
garlic clove
4 peppercorns

The celery got 1/2 tablespoon of dill seed.
The peppers and beans got fresh dill weed shoved in until I was bored of shoving. (I fear not enough. We'll see)

Veggie Brine

4 c white vinegar
4 c water
1/4 c kosher salt
1 c sugar

Boil to get everything combined and hot. Pour over veggies into jars and process 10 mins.

Red splattered kitchen

I should have expected it when I was doing cherries, but no. It took beets for me to go 'oh look, my kitchen floor looks vaguely like a murder scene'.

Things I learned today.. beets take a long time to cook. Pickled eggs cannot be reliably made shelf stable at home (It's a good thing I like pickled eggs enough to give up precious fridge space for them.), hot things come in small packages, and sometimes jars really do explode!

Pickled eggs in 3 verses

Hard boiled eggs. A 500 ml jar holds about 6 eggs. Unless they're bigger. Or smaller. A 250 ml jar holds 2 eggs. It's very cute. Boil up your eggs and peel them.


The brine: 
2 c apple cider vinegar
2 c water
1/2 c sugar
1 tsp kosher salt


Boil to get everything to dissolve well. 


Pack the eggs and spices into their jars. I decided to make each jar different, jar 3 is the 250 ml size, which is why the amounts are teeny. 


Jar 1: 2 dried peppers, 2 bay leaves, 6 peppercorns, 1 tsp dill seed, 1 tsp mustard seed
Jar 2: 6 peppercorns, 4 whole allspice, 4 cloves, 2 cinnamon sticks, 1 tsp caraway seeds
Jar 3: 1 bay leaf, 3 peppercorns, 1/2 tsp cumin seeds, 1/2 tsp mustard seeds


Pour brine over and cap. Let cool and store in the fridge.


Fruit Salsa


This is a bit of an experiment. It should be acidic enough to be canned, so I tried that with half. It's based on a fresh salsa recipe, and half of it went to the fridge immediately. One of these jars exploded in the boiling water canner. Either the jar was faulty, the temps just didn't make it happy, or something. So 500 ml jar in the fridge, and only 1 250 jar survived the canner. I also chopped everything today in the food processor. I live in the future, dammit.

Process in batches in the food processor to chop up small but not puree:

1 clove garlic
1/4 of a sweet onion
2 tiny hot peppers (oh gods, hot.. 1 would have been plenty)
1 red pepper
1 1/2c tart cherries (the last of the bucket!)
2 c yellow plums
1 c nectarine
2 tbsp lime juice
1/2 tsp cumin

Mix well. Taste. Realize the hot peppers are trying to kill you. Remember that you could have added another, but it's damn hard to take one out at this point.

I did not cook this salsa, I tossed it in jars and then processed. This also may have contributed to the jar death. Process 15 mins. Lament the mess left in the canning pot.

Red Relish

Another recipe where all my chopping was done via food processor.

4 cups of chopped cooked beets
4 cups chopped red cabbage
1 cup chopped sweet onion
1 cup chopped red pepper
3 cup vinegar
1 1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tbsp horseradish
1 tbsp salt
1 tbsp pickling spice (as made here)

For the beets: Simmer about 2 pounds of beets until tender, about 30 mins, perhaps longer. Trim off stems and roots and slide the peels off at this point, then chop.

Boil for 30 mins or so, until it's cooked through and not quite so liquidy. Put into jars, process 10 mins.

Rumtopf

Leftover fruit. Sugar. Rum.

How can this go badly?

So I had a couple cups of left over tart cherries, and a generous cup (once cut up) of apricots. The recipe I found suggested equal volumes of fruit and sugar. Most recipes go by weight, and call for half as much sugar as fruit. Which means mine is sugartastic. Oh well.

Add rum to cover. I used dark rum, it's what was in the house.

As it didn't come right to the top of the 2l mason jar, I filled a freezer bag with water, shoved that in to squish the fruit down into the rum and put the lid on over it.

Ideally, I'll keep adding in more fruit (perhaps not quite so much sugar next time), and keep it going through the season and then we can have booozey fruit of awesome in the winter.

Cherries and plums and cukes, oh my.

I realized today that if I was a good blogger, I'd of taken photos along the way. I'm not and I didn't. By and large, this is just so I don't forget what I did, without having to find the scrawled post-it notes ever again.

Spiced Golden Plum Jam (adapted out of Bernadin Complete Book of Home preserving)

1.5 litres of little yellow plums. halved and pitted
4 small cinnamon sticks
8 cardamom pods
healthy chunk of ginger
5 c sugar
1/2 c lime juice
1 packet liquid pectin
1/4 cup dark rum

Sensible people would take the time to make a spice bag (note to self, investigate making reusable spice bags), but I am not sensible people. I tossed them in, fished out the sticks and ginger at the end and didn't fuss too hard about the cardamom pods being left in the jam when I put it in jars. Life will go on.

Plums and spices into a pot to boil a while, until the plums are good and goopy. Add sugar, let that get back to boiling. Add pectin and and rum and boil hard for a good minute. Put in jars, process for 10 mins. Today's yield 14 125 ml jars, 1 250 ml jar.

The cherry recipes are hard to measure how many cherries I started with, as I picked up a 5kg bucket o'  sour cherries and then had a moment of 'omg, what do I /do/ with 5 kg of sour cherries!' 


So the cherries were pre-pitted, and arrived with 10% by weight sugar, which left lovely nice juice at the bottom of the bucket. 

Pickled Sour Cherries (taken straight from We Sure Can!)

Take 6 250 ml jars.

Into each one put:
3 allspice berries
1 or 2 sticks of cinnamon
1 small bay leaf
3 or 4 whole cloves

Fill with sour cherries from the bucket.

Prepare brine of 2 cups white vinegar, 1/2 cup sugar. Boil. Pour over cherries. 1/2" headspace.

Seal and process for 20 mins.

Vanilla Boozed Cherries (taken straight from We Sure Can!)

I used 6 250 ml jars, and 2 500 ml jars for this one. They spit out their liquid /everywhere/ in processing, and 3 didn't seal. Very disappointing on that front. I probably overfilled. Still tasty.

Fill each jar with cherries from the bucket.

Into each jar (doubled for the 500 ml jars): 1 tablespoon of kirsch and 1/4 tsp of vanilla.

Prepare syrup of 4 cups water, 1 3/4 cups sugar. Pour over cherries. 1/2" headspace.

Seal and process for 20 mins. Whine about lack of sealing and loss of liquid and wonder at the long process time in recipe.

At this point, have a little moment of wondering if it's a never ending bucket of cherries.

Cherry Apricot Spread (Bernardin Guide to Home Preserving, 3rd ed)

2 1/2 cups cherries
1 cup chopped apricots
1/2 cup cherry juice from the bottom of the bucket
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 pkg no sugar needed pectin
1 1/2 cups sugar

Fruit and juices in pot. Boil. Add pectin. Boil. Add sugar. Boil hard 5 minutes. Seal and process 10 mins. Marvel at how it's setting up solid as a rock /on the funnel/ in the time it takes to blink.

Set the rest of the cherry juice aside to be used as flavouring later. Set the rest of the cherries aside before you never ever want to see cherries again. 

Lazy Cucumber Relish (adapted from the big ass preserving book)

3 litre basket of cucumbers (a little past their prime, whoops), food processed all to hell
1 kg bag of frozen omelette mix (red and green peppers, onion, all pre chopped)
2 cups (ish) of chopped frozen celery

Sprinkle with 1/4 cup of kosher salt, let stand to thaw and drip. Squeeze out all the extra moisture after 4 or 5 hours.

In a pot combine: 3 cups white vinegar, 2 1/4 cups sugar, 3 tbsp mustard seeds, 3 tbsp celery seeds. Boil. Add veggies. Cook until things are nicely combined and cooked through.

Put in jars, 1/2" headspace. Seal and process 10 mins.

Collapse in a heap with a long island iced tea and swear you are never doing that much canning in one day again. 

Lazy Pickles

Like I've mumbled more than a few times, I keep trying to come up with ways to keep track of my canning, and generally failing at each one. So I'll go back to dropping it in a blog, and see how /that/ goes.

First off, do not accidentally stick your fingers in boiling water becuase you are using a taller canning kettle than usual. It will mean that you have to backseat drive the rest of your canning for the day while you whimper with an ice pack on your hand. Bad Idea.

Lazy pickles. Sterilize jars. Shove in spices and veggies. Pour brine over. Process. Done.

Alright, so there's more to it than that.

Zucchini: sliced thin on the mandoline (1/4" or so? Ish?), sprinkled with kosher salt, left to draw the moisture out.

Green Beans: Cut to fit the jars.

Asparagus: Cut to fit the jars.

I made my own pickling spice this time, from the Bernardin big recipe book. (Complete book of Home Preserving), with some changes.

Pickling Spice
Cinnamon stick (about 4 inches, 2 small ones), crushed
5 bay leaves, crushed
2 tbsp mustard seed
1 tbsp whole allspice
1 tbsp peppercorns
1 tbsp ground ginger
1 tbsp dill seeds
2 tsp cardamom pods
2 tsp hot pepper flakes
1 tsp whole cloves
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds

 Put in jar (250 ml worked well for me). Shake. In retrospect, I would not have put in the ground ginger. I am really hating how it makes my pickle juice look cloudy.

This particular batch of various vegetable pickles went as follows. Into a 500 ml jar I tossed in a tablespoon or so of chopped sweet pepper onion mix (yes, the frozen stuff, thawed, I told you these were lazy), a dried hot pepper in half of them, and then a half tablespoon of pickling spice. Add veggies. Add brine. Process. Two of the green bean jars (of the 4 total, I got more beans than I thought)  didn't get pickling spice, but instead got a couple teaspoons worth of dill seed. (what can I say, I <3 me some dill). Those also got brine made with cider vinegar, as I'd run of of the original brine and needed to make more)

The brine (from Bernardin's guide to home preserving)

5 cups vinegar (white or cider)
1 2/3 cups sugar
1 2/3 cups water
4 tsp pickling salt

Mix, boil, pour over veggies.

None of the veggies were cooked or blanched before they got hot brine put over them, and then processed for 15 mins in hot water bath.

We shall see how they taste in a few weeks!