Category Archives: canning and food preserving

Apple Pie Filling, in the Freezer

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 Autumn is one of my favorite times of the year, I love the colors, the smells and the food.  I even love fall canning season.  I get a great sense of satisfaction when I have rows of pretty bottled food, baskets of potatoes and squash all stored away for the winter.  Apples are one of my favorite foods to process, so many things can be done with apples.  Apples can just be left alone in cold storage for months, if they are just wanted for eating, they can also be made in to apple butter, pie filling, jelly, cider and vinegar.  Every part of an apple can be used for something. 

 This year I bought a big box of apples, thinking I was going to bottle them into pie filling and sauce, then I saw this post about Freezer Apple Pie Filling and I was sold!  The thought of throwing everything into a bag and not having to get out the pots and pan to bottle Apple Pie Filling, made me very happy.  (As a side note, I do plan on bottling some of the apples, I like to have food storage that isn’t dependent on electricity).  They great thing about this method is that I can do a bag here or there when I have an extra 30 minutes or so, it is that easy.

I am not going to type the whole recipe here, Julia at Blissfully Content did a great job, you can find the recipe HERE.

 

 

 

It took me about 30 minutes to put one bag together, peeling and slicing the apples too the majority of the time, and if I had one of those nifty apple-peeler-corer the time would be dramatically less, I would say maybe 10 minutes at the most.

What is your favorite way to use apples?

 

 

Beans

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My garden, this year, has been a sad little shadow of my past gardens.  The combination of a late, cold, wet spring and me being great with child for the first half of the summer, and nursing a hungry little monkey for the second half has made for a very late, very neglected, very low producing garden. 

 

 One item that has done very well, which it should since it is pretty much a no-brainer in gardening circles, are my green beans.  I planted a lot this year hoping that I would have enough to can, which I did.  And, as luck would have it, the all decided to ripen just as Baby Girl was born and when we came home there were pounds of beans that needed picking. And as luck would have it, I have a whole bunch of little fingers that are really good at picking beans, and snapping them.

The great thing about canning beans, is that they need little preparation, they aren’t like jellies and jams, they aren’t like tomatoes that need peeling either.   The only thing that needs to be done to the beans to get them ready for canning is a good washing, and snapping them to the size desired.  I then raw packed them in pint sized jars, added a half teaspoon sea salt, and hot water.  I then processed them for 20 minutes at 12 pounds pressure (the pounds of pressure needed is determined by altitude).  Simple and easy. 

 

I was able to can 24 pints, and the bean bushing are still producing like crazy, there will be many jars of beans on the shelves at our house to feed us all winter long!

How to Core a Pear

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It sees kind of funny to me, that in all the canning I do I have never worked with pears before.  Since I have never canned pears, or watched someone can pears I had to learn how to peel and core a pear.  It was really very simple and I will just let my pictures speak a thousand words for me.