We decided to do some canning this weekend. Well, I made the decision and Stefan thankfully helped out along the way. During the process, one thing became extremely clear – we need an outdoor kitchen. We’ve been trying to decide what to do with the little covered patio area we have across from our kitchen, which was once a chicken coop and long before that a coal storage shed, and an outdoor kitchen is definitely something we will not only use a lot, but think we would love having there.
Anyone who has canned before know that it is a long, drawn out process, and one shouldn’t use a Ceran cooktop with these huge pots for hours on end because it can cause your cooking field to crack or the coil inside to break. I’m not really looking to replace our range in the kitchen anytime soon, so we used our little camping cooker for this process. The kitchen gets warm, the process goes on forever…and your whole kitchen is held hostage by canning jars, paper towels, lids, jar clamps and all other things canning related. Canning truly is an all day affair, and if we had an outdoor kitchen in our little covered patio area, we would have spent the whole day outside instead of inside watching the second season of Prison Break (yes, the whole season.)
Canning could have gone a bit smoother for us this weekend. We started on Saturday and unfortunately my thermometer got water inside it and told us the wrong temp in the pot pretty much the whole time we were doing this. I should have noticed that the water wasn’t really boiling and it therefore couldn’t possibly be 200°F – but I was blinded by the fact that we’d bought enormous T-Bone steaks at the market in the morning and the meat haze had me crazy. That and I’m pregnant so I have even more blonde moments now than ever before. But because we thought the temp was close to 300°F, we didn’t waste too much gas on the experiment…thankfully.
Anyway, I figured it out after the last batch was in the canner and so we started over again on Sunday. Ended up loosing one can of Hearty Vegetable Soup because I didn’t release the seals of the jars from the day before and probably put the jar in too quickly…and the lid broke. But it could have been worse. And at least we caught on to the problem before I put everything in storage for a while and then we got incredibly sick!
We got through the first 1.5 hours of canning for the veggie soup (5 liter jars finished) and were in the middle of the rest of the veggie soup plus some cream of tomato soup when the gas ran out. Unfortunately we didn’t have more so we had to freeze everything that wasn’t finished. There was just barely enough room in the freezer!
We’re probably going to try one of the cans of veggie soup for dinner tonight. The thing I really like about the recipe is that you can mix and match later on, adding a few things to the recipe to make it more interesting such as making it into minestrone or giving it a Mexican flair. No idea how this stuff tastes but it sure looks healthy.
And the cream of tomato soup that we tried yesterday with grilled cheese has definitely caused us to rule out buying anymore canned tomato soup. We only like one brand anyway which is barely sold anywhere these days and costs €2.50 a can…compared to about €0.50 which goes into our new soup, if that.
Yep, recipes are following!
