Pantry round-up

The major drawback to canning food is that it has to happen in the summer.... there's a constant dance between having jars ready to go in the water bath, and needing to get them off the kitchen counters and in to the pantry, but at the same time not wanting to heat up the kitchen to hotter than hell in order to accomplish it!

But at some point it just has to get done. We reached that point yesterday, on one of the hottest and most humid days we've had, and I made our kitchen worse by canning pears. But at least now the counters are clear!  I got a great deal - $30 for a 40lb box - and now we have 20 jars of pears in the pantry! We've already made a caramelised pear upside down cake with one of the jars, and there were enough pears left to just eat them for dessert. They're delicious, too!

In tomato news, I discovered this summer that despite the volunteer plants showing up to the party uninvited, they don't actually produce much. Live and learn. So we picked 25lbs of tomatoes (very disappointing) and made 11 pints of spicy salsa and 24 jars of pizza sauce. I'm still searching for a good pasta sauce recipe... but even if I'd found it, there weren't enough tomatoes to try it with this year.

So my pantry is stuffed with cherry pie filling, pears and pizza sauce, and Jeff is about ready to rip out the patio and rebuild the whole thing. He has till March, because that's when next year's tomatoes are getting planted. Watch this space!