It's the Tuesday Can-Can

Today is Mike's second day of his vacation!! It is so great having him around. We always have a great time together.

He encouraged me to finally use the billion tomatoes, jalapenos, and cucumbers we have. We decided that we wanted to try to can this stuff this year. Which, if you know me at all, you know it is a hard concept for me. I have lots of food safety issues and the idea of ME canning something to safety standards just seems a little out of my league. But I thought with Mike's help I would give it a try.

So, I emailed Mike's mom for his Grandma's relish recipe and I searched and searched for a salsa recipe on-line that could be canned. This was a little difficult because Mike really hates vinegar. I mean he hates it. So I was looking for a safe canning salsa that didn't have vinegar. I found several that met the standards but they had lemon instead of vinegar.

So I gathered the ingredients washed the jars and Mike and I hit the kitchen chopping and boiling and washing. Man you should have smelled that batch of salsa when it was done. It smelled delicious!!!

Then we tasted it.

Oh my. Yeah, you can definitely taste the lemon. Enough so that it made you pucker when you taste it. That isn't really a good trait in Salsa. I have no idea what we did wrong. And it didn't just make one jar of salsa. After doctoring it and playing with a bit I think we got it so that it is passable but it definitely isn't good. I wanted to just throw it out. Really we were only out the three onions I bought at the store, everything else was from the garden, oh and the lemon juice. But Mike convinced me that maybe it would get better with time and maybe it would taste better in stuff.

Also since we had never canned before, we thought this might be a good thing to practice with, that way we would know what we were doing when it came to the relish. Let's just say that we put the fire out on the stove several times before we had it boiling correctly.

Then the relish went fairly easily together, but we decided that a bigger pot for the water bath might work better. Mike got the idea of the turkey frying pot. We washed it out and filled it up. Put the jars in there and it seemed to work well until we pulled the jars out and they were covered with this residue from the pot. The pot had looked clean when we started out but apparently was covered with a grease residue.

I have no idea how that will affect the canning process or the relish. I am a little nervous about the whole thing.

Oh, and did I mention that the five pints of relish that we made only used up one and a half of my cucumbers?

I am not sure that canning is my thing.

Kristen