Sunday, November 16, 2008

Yummy Applesauce

Ok, so I don't know what has gotten into my husband, but yesterday he started talking about canning our own food. How hard can it be? All sorts of people used to do it. And we would like to get self sufficient when we move to Cali, and when we have a nice garden, it would be good to be able to preserve our food. So we started looking around for a pressure canner. But we were having a hard time finding one, so we ended up with a 5 layer food dehydrator instead. We dehydrated some food yesterday, and it should be ready by tomorrow. We did bananas, kiwi, pears, and some orange peppers that we had left over from dinner.



Somehow, Matt was still not satisfied, so today when we saw a pressure canner and all sorts of canning supplies at Tayler's Do-It center (our local hardware store) we decided to take the leap. But how to get started? We wanted to start with something fairly simple that didn't have a lot of ingredients. The applesauce recipe in the book we had bought yesterday (we can't do anything without first buying a book on it) looked good, so we though, what the heck? Let's do it. And here are the products of our labor!










Yes, I helped, although it doesn't look like it because Matt is the only one in the pictures. I was the one keeping up on the dishes and I actually pulled all the jars out of the water to be filled and put the lids on.

Actually it was great fun, and we have some really yummy applesauce to show for it. (We had some left over, not enough for a jar, so we chilled it and ate it already :)

Fun stuff, huh. And add to that the fact that we bought a bread maker and now I'm going to be making all our bread for sandwiches. Matt'll make a homemaker out of me!

~Pam
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2 comments:

  1. BethNovember 17, 2008 at 10:22 PM

    Hey Pam, welcome to the wonderful world of home economics!!! I didn't think anyone else would do it besides me :) I don't know if you actually need a pressure canner for food stuff like applesauce, or any of the other fruits or jams and jellies. I just use a water bath canner. I think, though, if you are going to be canning vegetables, you need the pressure canner. And of course, if you are going to can meat, you need the pressure canner. Hopefully I did not lead you completely astray. Have fun, and soon we can compare notes.

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  2. Pam EmersonNovember 18, 2008 at 4:55 AM

    Too true, too true. Yeah, we did some research and found out that you might as well get the pressure canner, because you can use it for both. You just take the gasket off and don't lock the lid. So we use the pressure canner for both the water bath canning and for the vegetables and meat (if we ever do those, which we probably will). So, Matt did some Grape Jam last night. I don't know how well it turned out, I guess we'll see. He's afraid it didn't set, and we'll end up with grape syrup instead. Either way, we used enough sugar that it will taste delicious! :)
    ~Pam

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