A Day of Canning

This morning I started right away working on the yellow hominy and got it all canned – 12 pints.

If anyone is interested in making hominy, Red Rose Homestead has good, fairly concise instructions in this video. At about the 20:00 point, she’s talking about her jars, after canning, having no water – the corn absorbed it all. She mentions that her beans do the same thing. In my opinion, she’s filling the jars with too much corn and not enough water.

I filled my jars about 3/4 full of hominy. It was actually 230 grams of hominy in each jar.

The photo above is before canning. The top photo is after canning. After canning, the hominy had plumped up and the jars were full, but the water still covered the kernels.

I have this jar tilted so you can see that the water level is over the top of the hominy.

When canning anything that expands greatly – beans and hominy come to mind – always add more water than you think you need until you’re confident you know the correct ratios.

I finished canning the hominy, went downstairs to take the dogs out, walked by the shelves of tomatoes; told myself I’ll do them tomorrow, then said NO! Get it done.

I gathered up about 30 pounds of tomatoes, washed them, removed the cores, quartered them and roasted them in the oven. Then once they cooled, I slipped off the skins, heated them for a while on the stove and canned them.

They filled 10 quart jars and 1 pint jar. I’m hoping to have enough tomatoes to get at least 30 quarts. There are enough almost ready tomatoes on the shelf outside that should fill 10 more quarts so I’ll only need about 30 more pounds and I believe there are that many left on the vines.

When we lived in MO the first time – it was probably 13 years ago – I had canned about 60 jars of tomatoes. There were so many to get canned, instead of making sauces or salsa or any other “secondary” type recipe, I started canning hot packing almost raw tomatoes with nothing added except salt and a bit of citric acid. I would use those tomatoes in soups, chili, spaghetti sauce. If a recipe called for anything – sauce, paste, diced – I used a jar of these tomatoes. One day I made spaghetti sauce. Chad and Vince raved about it. I pretty much forgot about that and since then, I’ve had fewer tomatoes to get canned and I would make a variety of recipes but I hadn’t canned just plain, barely heated tomatoes.

Chad has continued to talk about that spaghetti sauce. He thinks it’s because I left the seeds in the tomatoes (instead of using the food mill to remove the seeds and bigger pieces of pulp. Today, when I was going to can the tomatoes, I thought . . I wonder if it was just the whole canned tomatoes that made that sauce so good. It could have been whatever kind of tomatoes I grew back then . . I have no idea but this is the easiest way to can them so I did it and I’ll try using some of this to make spaghetti sauce and see what kind of reaction I get.

The food truck with fish will be back in town tomorrow so we’re having fish. No cooking tomorrow!