The saga of the lids

Believe it or not, this is only three tomato plants. Somewhere between when they were planted and now they turned into triffids. The other day I decided that it was time to tackle the triffid jungle and I went out and picked 9lbs of tomatoes.

What to do with 9lbs of tomatoes? My brilliant idea was to can them! I've never canned tomatoes before in my life (never had 9lbs of tomatoes sitting in my fridge before in my life, either.) So I borrowed a water bath canner and away we went.

First step was to sterilise all the jars and lids. This was the easy part. We had two different sizes of jars, pints and quarts, and we were even efficient enough to test our lids on the quart jars to make sure they fit. Then it got messy, scalding and cold dipping all the tomatoes to get the skins off. Yucky.

We put all our lovely tomatoes into our lovely sterilised jars, and got our sterilised lids. This is where it all starts to go south. Jeff put the first lid on the first pint jar - imagine our shock and surprise when it didn't fit. Nope. Standard lids don't fit on standard jars. Who knew?

Jeff dashed out to the store to get more lids. We're on a timetable here, with tomatoes sitting open in jars. There are no lids that fit at the store. I start madly sterilising all the quart jars, because we know the lids fit those!

This was intended to be an illustrated essay about our first attempt at canning, but there are no more pictures, because once he got back and we started dumping the contents of 8 pint jars into 4 quart jars, there was tomato juice flying all over the kitchen. Plus we were too frantic to even think about where the camera was.

While Jeff took the kids swimming, I watched a pot boil for the requisite 45 minutes it takes. And when I lifted the jars out of the water bath, only one jar had survived. The lids on the other jars had all buckled and not sealed, so it all had to be done again! I was about ready to chew up those lids and spit them out.

I'm so over canning tomatoes. But we did the water bath again, and now we do have 4 quarts of canned tomatoes sitting in a cupboard. I would take a picture, but Jeff has worked his magic on the kitchen again and I don't know which cupboard they're in.

Ahh, domestic bliss. I could do with less domestic and more bliss!