We ordinarily try to avoid making Sunday a canning day, but when you have 65 Lbs of peaches sitting in boxes in the garage, you can’t let them sit too long. They don’t keep, especially when they are picked by over-zealous kids who have a tendency to drop them into the box, rather than gently placing them.
So after Mass, Evie and Ellie made a lovely tea, with sausages and whipped cream (for the scones). Then Mommy took them to a birthday party for a few hours.
While they were gone Daddy and Winnie took the last batch of elderberries out of the dehydrator. This was a four Lb batch of elderberries.
When fully dehydrated it yielded just over 11 ounces of dried berries. We now have a two quart jar of dried elderberries under the tea cover for this winter.
Next sauerkraut. We had actually attempted a sauerkraut party the evening before, but it ended up being more party than sauerkraut, and we still had two large heads of green cabbage to go.
This is just one head.
Making sauerkraut is very simple with a digital scale. There are only three ingredients: cabbage, salt and water.
And the lactobacilli do the rest.
We tried a technique Kathleen got from an Amish cookbook to make and can kraut all in one go. It is supposed to seal the jar and then ferment the kraut inside it. This doesn’t make sense to me because as the kraut ferments it releases CO2 which should increase the pressure inside, not create negative pressure that you need to seal a jar.
The jars didn’t seal, but also, I didn’t pour in actual boiling water like the recipe called for, just almost boiling water. Which raises another question: Wouldn’t the boiling water kill the lactobacilli that are supposed to be doing the fermentation? So many questions.
This is why the new jars need to be on a tray or something. Sometimes the brine can overflow a bit.
Once the kraut was jarred, Daddy got to pealing peaches. By the time Mommy and the girls got home we had almost a whole box pealed.
When Mommy and the girls got home, we continued on with pealing and canning peaches. First we canned half peaches. This is our favorite was to eat them. Evie especially would eat a jar of peaches every morning for breakfast if we let her. I think we did 15 liters of peaches? Or 20?
Looks like 15.
This was definitely an order pizza type of night.
Then we boiled up a dozen of the red peaches into peach cobbler jelly, another family favorite.
While the girls juiced the remainder of the peaches.
The “Onceler” hand!
The juice is canned as peach nectar.
Nectar is a very easy thing to can and is very tasty with cider or seltzer water.
Last batch out.
It was a long afternoon, but as Ellie was heard to comment (while washing dishes) “Well, isn’t this a fun family activity!”
Sometimes it is hard to tell whether she is being serious or sarcastic or both.
Little Farm in the Big City 