I stay at home with the kids and during Kate's pregnancy I was L-A-Z-Y. My kids ate so many frozen waffles and grilled cheese it's ridiculous. I did not enjoy Kate's pregnancy (burning ribs, heartburn, and just extreme exhaustion). I am sure it had a lot to do with running after a 3 year old and a 1 year old but it was just really hard to find motivation to do anything. I was up to my eyeballs in laundry, dishes, pretty much everything.
We had an amazing garden this past year, only half of it produced vegetables but the things that did survive did REALLY WELL. For our first year we had tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers coming at us faster than we knew what to do with. Most people we talked to didn't get squat, us, we had over 300 of those beautiful ripe tomatoes. So being pregnant and lazy I really didn't want to deal with these, we ate what we could and put gallon size freezer bags. We filled 3/4's of our chest freezer in the basement.
I talked to my Mother in law about doing a baking day, but low and behold I had hundreds of tomatoes in the freezer. Not really ideal when you need to store frozen bread. My kids are in love with her bread, they'll eat it for a meal when she sends some home. Not going to lie I love her bread too! So we're baking poppy seed bread, pumpkin muffins (Jillian calls these Birfday Cake), butter pecan bread, and carrot bread. I would make banana bread too but Jillian ate all of my bananas. I will share the recipies after we make them! You won't be dissapointed! So I had no option but to deal with our mass overabundance of tomatoes.
So anyways Sunday night I researched canning and found some recipes that sounded good and got to cooking. Do NOT start this process at 8pm at night, we finally finished around 2am and that was only 1 batch. Especially when you think you have everything and end up having to go to Meijer at 10 to get a massive pot because the ones your have won't fully cover the jars. Whoops.
Our house smelled amazing.
We spent forever peeling skins, cutting vegetables, and googling "how to can" and each and every step was a big process. The last taste test before we canned was delicious! I haven't actually made anything with them but hopefully we didn't mess it up too bad. I'll be giving a few jars away to some guinea pigs to try. :-) Yes I know you expert gardners and canners are shaking your heads in shame that I froze all those tomatoes and it took me months to actually getting around to using them but I did it and hopefully the labor that was put into them was worth it. If not ohh well. We ended up with 12 pints of pizza sauce, 12 pints and 6 quarts of "basketti sauce".
(and yes I am aware these say 2013 but that's when we harvested so I decided to write that on them instead of when we actually canned.)
We will be doing a garden again this year, last year was our first time doing it so I think I was pretty overwhelmed but now we have an idea of what we're doing so hopefully it will make the process more fluent. I was going to try to do some Salsa but that was a little overwhelming so I stuck to just Pizza Sauce and Spaghetti Sauce and with research I will hopefully master salsa this summer! I really am excited and now I need to come up with a good game plan for this coming year. Tips, tricks, and suggestions would be awesome!
I'll have another post soon, I've been working on it and praying about it.
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