Canning season opens at the Brown house

The smells of warming apple pie filling and salsa mingled in my kitchen last night as I prepared for my first canning of the season. We have at least 12 pounds of apples from our church’s mini-orchard and as many tomatoes from our gardens so I was chopping, measuring, stirring, chopping some more. It’s quite a way to get in the good but hard sort of work that makes me sleep well!

I’m still using the salsa recipe I found a few years ago at www.cdkitchen.com. That’s one of the great sites where you can enter the numbers of servings you want to get from a recipe and it will re-calculate the amount of all the ingredients for you. Of course, some will come out with something like 2.491 cups, but I certainly don’t concern myself with being that precise.

Although our favorite preserved apple pie recipe calls for freezing in a plastic bag, you can also find recipes for canned apple pie filling. www.allrecipes.com is one site where you’ll locate a canned possibility. That site also has the scaling feature plus another option that changes the unit measurements to metric if you would like.

There are all sorts of tools online to help with your preservation efforts this season. If you find a good one to share, do post it in a comment so everyone can share.