Canning Pepper Rings

Step 1: Prepare your stove top! 1 pot of boiling water for water bath canning, 1 pot of vinegar and water (equal parts vinegar and water...I used 1/2 cup of each), 1 pot for lids. Place your jars in your boiling water to get them sterlized while you prepare your pepper rings.

Step 2: Clean your pepper, slice them in the desired thickness. Peal your garlic.

Step 3: Pack your garlic and pepper rings into your jars. I like garlic so I used 4 cloves, but you could just use 1.

 Step 4: Put 1/4 tsp canning salt (or regular salt but canning salt will help prevent the mixture from getting cloudy in storage)

Step 5: Fill your jars with the boiling vinegar water mixture leaving 1/4 inch headspace.

Step 6: Put sterlized lids and rings onto jars and place jars in the boiling water bath canner and process for 10 minutes.

Step 7: Remove jars from canner and let them rest overnight. Remove the rings and check the seals, clean the jars, label and store!

Canning Peaches Step by Step Raw Pack

I have attempted to can peach halves several times and the peaches are always too ripe and so they dont peel or seperate in half very well. These peaches were pretty hard and I was excited to see if it would work!!

Step 1: Blanch your peaches by placing them in boiling water for about 30 seconds and straight into ice cold water.

Step 2: Peel your peaches. After blanching the skin should peel right off fairly easily. If you need to do another quick blanch to help loosen the peels more, just be careful not to overcook them or they will be mushy.

Step 3: Cut your peach in half and pop out the pit. You can use a spoon to dig out the center red part or you can leave it, but it will get dark during canning but wont affect the taste.

Step 4: Place your peach halves into your hot sterilized jars and slightly pack them in...dont push too hard or you will mush your peaches, but pack them in a little so you dont have too much syrup.

Step 5: Prepare a simple syrup. I did a light syrup of about 3 cups of sugar and 6 cups of water to fill 7 quart jars of peach halves. Bring your sugar water mixture to a low boil until your sugar is dissolved.

Step 6: Fill your jars with the syrup and remove air bubbles. Leave 1/2 inch headspace.

Step 7: Clean rims of jars and place sterilized lids and rings onto the top of each jar.

Step 8: Place in boiling water bath and process Pints 25 minutes and Quarts 30 minutes.

Step 9: Remove jars from boiling water and let rest overnight.

Step 10: Remove rings and check for proper sealing. Clean jars (use soap and warm water because you will probably have some sticky sugar all over your jars), label and store!

Canning Rotel! Homemade Step by Step with pics

I love Rotel!! Its great in so many things: main dishes, dips, rice, etc. So why not can it from my own tomatoes and peppers!!?? I looked at a few recipes and here is what I ended up with! (This recipe is for 6 Pints)

Step 1: Measure out all your ingredients

- 6 lbs of tomatoes (I didnt peel or stem them)

- About 6 oz peppers (I used 1 green bell pepper, 2 small jalapeno peppers seeds and all, 3 small melrose peppers seeds and all)

- 8 oz onions (I used red onions from the garden)

Step 2: With a food processor, dice up the onions and peppers.

Step 3: Sautee the onions and peppers (you can add diced garlic too, I didnt this time but will probably add garlic next time!)

Step 4: Dice up your tomatoes and add them to the onions and peppers.

Step 5: Add 1/2 Cup white vinegar, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 2 tbsp canning salt...Bring the mixture to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes. You can simmer it longer if you want a thicker more concentrated rotel.

Step 6: Ladel hot rotel into hot sterilized jars

Step 7: Clean off rims of jars and secure the lids and rings. Place them in a hot water bath canner for 10 minutes.

Step 8: Remove from water and let it rest overnight. Remove rings and check for sealed lids. Clean the jars, label and store!

Strawberry Cutting and Freezing

We were blessed with the opportunity to purchase a large quantity of strawberries for 50 cents per pound. Seeing as I didn't get around to preparing the beds for my strawberries and we didn't grow any this year, I was super excited to be able to stock up on strawberries!! We love berries, the kids eat them almost every morning with their oatmeal, and we also love afternoon smoothies! I called my sister and told her about the strawberries and so we loaded up all the kids and drove out to buy some flats of strawberries! We ended up getting 160 pounds and so we went back to her house and the cleaning began!! We put the kids to work and they were fantastic! Kurtis, my brother in law, (after he got over the initial shock of Evie buying so many strawberries) pitched in to help and made some fantastic strawberry adult beverages! My mom and dad stopped by to help out for a while too! And of course Bryan hurried over to help out with the strawberry mania!

We Started by filling up the sinks and cleaning all the strawberries. Madison (my 7 year old niece) was extremely helpful!! She probably did more work than most of the adults! She kept the sinks full by getting all the strawberries out of the flats when the we needed more cleaned and she would clean them and drain them and then keep our little piles stacked up and ready to be cut! She also helped collecting all the stems we cut off and filling the freezer baggies with strawberries! She was amazing :)

All the other kids wanted to help too! Laken (my 5 year old niece) and Henry were helping with the assembly line of bringing new strawberries to clean. Mason (my 1 year old nephew) even pitched in a few times with carrying strawberries! Mostly Laken, Henry, Addie and Mason offered their services with EATING the strawberries...I think we have a few that we could spare though :)

The crew at work! You can see the big pile of bagged strawberries on the counter...and that was barely one third of what we ended up with!

We really didn't have any special method behind our madness, we just cleaned and cut the strawberries and then put them in freezer bags. We filled the flats back up with the bags and stacked them. We ended up with a little over 60lbs lbs of cleaned strawberries each (Evie and I). We ate ALOT of strawberries, kept about 10 lbs of whole, uncut strawberries, mom and dad took a few bags and who knows how many the kids hid around the house to be able to eat later...lol, I'm just kidding Evie, I sure hope not!! And the stems all went to our compost!!

I didn't get a picture of the entire pile of bagged strawberries...I know I know I'm bummed too! And by the time I realized I hadn't taken that picture, Evie had already put all her strawberries in her freezer and ours were loaded up in our car ready to go home...and the last thing we wanted to do after 3 hours of strawberry cleaning was to unload everything just for a picture!

I do have to share this picture though!! Bryan and I were trying to take a serious, nice picture and when I was looking back over the pictures I see Evie in the background! The funniest part is that I didn't even see her at first until Bryan said "Ah, look at the Troll in the background" and Kurtis said "wow one eyed cyclopes!"...I relooked at the picture and then we all laughed hysterically for quite a while! Thank you Evie for a hilarious picture!! I guess thats what happens when you get 2 sisters together for any length of time...we just get giddy and silly and funny things happen!