My boyfriend's mom cans delicious salsa, relish, and jam and my uncle makes amazing canned beets. I feel like it's sort of a dying art, food preservation, so I was wondering how many of us have ever done it? Other methods I'm thinking of include freeze drying, dehydrating, etc. I'm really interested in building up a bit of a stockpile in my home of canned veggies and fruits, jellies, sauces, you name it. I think that you can get really creative and give the foods some amazing flavour and that it's an excellent way to have an emergency stock of food in your home.

Thoughts?

Canning is so not as difficult as it seems. I'm trying to find the website I used when I canned apple butter and apple sauce this past autumn, and if I find it I'll definitely link it here, but the internet has TONS of resources on canning, so a google search will definitely give you a good start.

In my pantry right now I have canned apple butter and apple sauce made from apples I picked fresh at a farm 30 minutes away from my house. The taste is awesome and while the cooking and canning process was definitely an all day affair, it was totally worth it. We actually gave away a few jars for Christmas!

I got my canning stuff at Target. I got jars and lids and an accessories kit that included this magnetic stick for lifting jar lids out of boiling water, a jar holder, and a funnel. I also got a tall pot to put my cans in, and it worked perfectly. It was technically a "canner", but it suited my needs and I was able to can 6 jars in it at a time. You can get a canner and a canning rack to hold the jars, but since I wasn't sure how it was going to go I didn't do that.

I was a little scared of the canning process but it turned out really easy, honestly the hardest part was the cooking! It was satisfying to fill up my sterilized jars and later, hear the seals pop as I pulled them out of the water.

The winter climate here is pretty harsh, and I just can't wait until spring so I can can (ha! can can), fresh fruits and veggies as well as fresh jellies and salsas and sauces. I think I'll be canning a lot more next year and I'm really excited for it!

Relishes or Chutneys are so easy to make and I love the smell of them, it was something mum and I would make together when I lived at home and my kids all like to help too. All of the veg are grown in our garden so all I do is get the vinegar, spices and the sugar. My mum loves making jams and jellies but we don't really eat them so there's no point in me wasting stuff we could pickle instead, one of her favourites is Marrow and Ginger Jam were I would make a spicy chutney instead.

I love pickled beets too.

I canned peaches, apricots and salsa and froze plums from my parents tree this year.
My mom has a market-garden and sells homemade rhubarb fruit leather and rhubarb candies (sweetened dehydrated rhubarb), she also dries onions and cayenne peppers at the end of the season and sells them as spices. She also cans stewed rhubarb, rhubarb jam, red pepper jelly and pickled peppers (from the garden). Mom also freezes peas, broccoli, brussel sprouts, spinach, swiss chard, green beans and carrots through out the summer so my brothers and I get a freezer full of them in the fall. Mom and dad also buy peaches and cherries can them for their own personal stock pile.
But my family may be a bit unusual, as we have a farm and produce almost all our own eggs and meat as well. We often joke about being on the 100 metre diet instead of the 100 mile diet.

I used to dehydrate all kinds of stuff but someone borrowed my dehydrator and never returned it. It wasn't really my favorite food preservation method. It was more of a fun way to make dried fruit.

I do can pears, applesauce, peaches, sweet and sour sauce, tomatoes, and jam. I used to do about 6 cases of stuff a year and another 3 cases of jam and jelly I gave away all year, but now I just do blueberry jam because I have 8 acres of wild blueberries and quarts of fruit because I buy it from a local farm and it is better than anything you can buy.

I LOVE canning. It is such a satisfying addition to any meal, a home made sauce or fruit or produce. I made blueberry thumbprint cookies for Christmas with the wild blueberry jam and they were divine!

I'd like to plant some mint this year and see if I can dry some. It runs rampant at my mothers but here the deer eat just about everything so I gave up grand gardening ambitions years ago.

Keep On Dancing*

I've never canned anything. However, I have a garden and kind of a big one at that. I freeze a lot of the veggies that I get more of then others. Like for instance, I planted peas and green and yellow beans. I got more beans than peas so I froze some of the beans. We ate the peas. I plant herbs. What I don't use fresh, I dry in the microwave and use them all year round.

My sister made applesauce once. I thought it tasted terrible! I don't know what she did to it but I didn't like it. When I cook, since 3 of us live at home, sometimes I make more than 3 of us can eat. When that happens, we have a huge upright freezer in our cellar. We have lots of plastic containers and we freeze lots of leftovers so we can have them again for a night when someone can't cook.

I've done food dehydrating. I have some failed experiments in fruit dehydrating under my belt (did not know you needed to treat the foods before you dehydrate them, whoops...). And from what I'm told, I'm quite the excellent jerky maker.

The thing about making your own jerky is that even dehydrated, it has a higher moisture content than what you'd get at the store, so it doesn't keep as long. You get maybe a week out of it. :/ Probably less if you live in a humid climate.

My gramma cans alot, but I don't know that much about it. She makes a jelly that I'd seriously consider bathing in, if that weren't gross, lol...her jelly is so crazy good!

I don't can so much myself. But I live in an area where home canned products are super easy to get and cheap, too. All kinds of jellies and sauces and salsa, especially. And my mom and aunt still make some of their own, so I usually can get what I want. My favorite find is local honey!

This past Christmas, daughter and I did make homemade salsa for gifts, but that was the first in a while.

kk~

I much prefer the taste of frozen food to canned or other preservation methods, so we don't really can much in my family. My grandmother's deep freeze is 12 feet long, it's huge!

We do, however, make jam whenever we get a windfall of fruit. We used to make killer plum jam from the trees on our property, and whenever we go strawberry picking, we make freezer jam, which tastes so much like fresh fruit, and is worth it to me, since you can't get it in stores.

My sister also makes her own plum puddings, which because of the alcohol, keeps several years.
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