The Plan was to Can!

Freshly picked Pineapple tomatoes

The garden is coming along great, it is like a jungle out there! I have had several picking of green beans and the mysterious peppers turned out to be Anaheim peppers. I planted one heirloom tomato plant and have gotten several of them to enjoy! If you have never tried one of the many different varieties of heirloom tomato, I urge you to get to your Farmer's Market and give them a try! Most have such a fresh and great tomato flavor. They are more for eating out of hand then for cooking. Mine are Pineapple tomatoes and they are as tasty as they are beautiful!

My intention this morning when I got up was to can some picante sauce. I had a bowl full of Roma tomatoes from the garden and some peppers all ready to go. I got this recipe from Beth over at the Cooking Light Bulletin Board and it has been our standard canned sauce for the last 2 years. I have had some bad experience in the past with home canned salsa/picante sauce. The recipes I had tried were too vinegary. I was reluctant to try this one but am I ever glad I did! This recipe is easy (once you get past the peeling of the tomatoes, but I have a handy gadget for that-more about it later) and has a great flavor.

However, canning today was not it the cards I'm afraid. First I chopped and added all the ingredients except the tomatoes and cilantro. I save the tomatoes for last. I peeled and seeded and diced all the tomatoes, to only discover that I had a mere 5 1/2 cups instead of the required 10! Since I already had enough of all the other ingredients for a full batch mixed in, doing a half batch did not seem feasible. I rushed out to the garden in hopes that I had another bowl full of tomatoes that had ripened overnight. No such luck. I will probably have some more in a couple days. So, I put it all in a container and put it in the fridge. I hope all will be well for me to add the rest of the tomatoes in a couple days. I guess I could have went to the farm stand and bought some more, but that seems so crazy when I have a abundance that will be ripe soon.

My canning supplies waiting patiently

So dear readers, I will include the recipe for the picante, as I can assure you it is wonderful. Hopefully I can post about the end result in a couple days. This was to be my ARF Tuesday submission for Sweetnicks. I may submit it anyway as a work in progress! Be sure to check out the other submissions at her site.

Picante in progress!

Now for the gadget. Last year I found a soft fruit/tomato peeler that eliminates the need to blanch and shock the fruit or tomato to remove the skin. It works great! It is made by Zyliss. I love using this instead of messing around with all that water!

That is it for tonight. Be sure to check back in for an update on the canning!

Recipes
Canned Picante Sauce