Canning/Preserving

In 1987 I wrote a canning program, called “Food for Keeps” in the Plan It and Can It series, (I also wrote another program for planning and planting a garden called “Compute-A-Garden”) for the Apple II computers and they were published by Clo’s----line Software, Inc. It took many hours of research figuring out how many pounds of the different fruit and vegetables it would take to fill a pint/quart plus the recipes for the syrups. You could put in how many pounds you might have of a certain thing and then it would tell you how many pints/quarts you would end up with or you could say how many pints/quarts you would want to preserve and it would tell you how many pounds you would have to have to get that many jars. It also calculated how much you would end up spending on a pint/quart, etc. it even had a place for you to enter the name of the item, date you preserved the item, and when to use it by so you could print out labels to put on your jars or freezer containers.
Then it took many more hours to write the program in Apple Basic. My son Bob spend many more hours doing all the graphics by sketching them out on paper and then using the up, down, and side arrow keys to program them onto a disk....... boy, graphics have come a loooooong way! I still have the program plus an old computer that it runs on. I wish that I could figure out how to get all that information transferred over to a program for the iPad so I could sell it on iTunes! - Maybe that will be my next project!
Talking about preserving food..... it’s that time of year when all that produce is calling our names to put it up (as they used to say. I have done some preserving already and plan to do a bit more, if time permits, using the following recipes:

Banana Butter

3 1/2 lbs Bananas - ripe
3 cup Sugar
1/2 cup Lemon juice
1/2 cup Maraschino cherries chopped
1 tsp Butter
Peel and mash bananas. Measure 4 cups into a 4- to 6-quart pot or Dutch oven. Add sugar, lemon juice, cherries and butter. Mix well.
Bring to a hard rolling boil, stirring constantly. Reduce heat and simmer gently, uncovered, for 20 minutes, stirring often. Pour into hot jars, up to 1-inch from the top. Adjust lids and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

Cranberry Sauce

1 quart Cranberries
2 cup Sugar
1 cup Water
Pick over and wash berries, add water and cook until berries are soft.
Press through fine sieve, add sugar and boil another 3 minutes. Pour into clean jars to within 1/2 inch of top of jar. Put on cap, screwing band tight. Process 10 minutes in boiling water bath.

Cucumber Oil Pickles

Yield: 2 Quarts
1/3 cup Salt
1 quart Plus 1/2 c. water
12 6” cukes - thinly sliced
2 medium onions - thinly sliced
1/2 cup Sugar
2 cup Vinegar
2 T Mustard seed
1 T Celery seed
1 1/2 t. Peppercorns
1/4 cup Olive oil
Dissolve the salt in one quart of the water add the cukes and onions and let stand 12 to 18 hours.
Drain the cukes. Taste them, and if they are too salty, rinse them in cold water.
Boil the 1/2 c. water, sugar, vinegar, mustard and celery seeds and the peppercorns in a 6 quart kettle for 3 minutes.
Add the cukes, onions and the oil and cook only until the cukes begin to look clear but are not soft.
Pack boiling hot into hot sterilized jars and seal at once.

Homemade Canned Pork N Beans

Yield: 8 Pint Jars
2 pounds navy or great northern beans
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 medium onions - chopped
3/4 teaspoon prepared yellow mustard
2 tablespoons cane syrup, molasses or honey
2 (15-ounce) cans tomato sauce
3 cups water
1 1/2 teaspoons to 3 tablespoons salt, optional
8 pieces 2” each bacon, salt pork, or fatback
8 pint-sized canning jars and lids (clean, hot, and sterilized)
In each jar, place 1/2 cup beans. Distribute onions evenly into jars. Mix in a saucepan: brown sugar, yellow mustard, molasses, tomato sauce, water, bring to a boil. Add one cup sauce to each jar of beans.
Add 1 piece of pork and push under liquid. Fill remainder of space in jars with boiling water, leaving a one-inch head-space. Clean jar rims and adjust lids. Process at 10 pounds pressure for 75 minutes.

Spiced Lemon Pickles

Yield: 6 Half-pints
9 Large lemons
2 1/4 cup Sugar
1/8 t. Salt
1/4 cup Water
1 cup Cider vinegar
1 Cinnamon stick
1/2 t. Whole allspice
1 Small ginger root
5 Whole cloves
Wash and thoroughly dry the lemons. Cut them without peeling, into crosswise slices 1/4 inch thick.
Combine the sugar, salt, water and vinegar in a saucepan. Tie the spices in a cheesecloth bag and add to the syrup. Boil 5 minutes.
Drop the lemon slices into the boiling syrup and boil one minute.
Discard the spice bag and pack the lemons into hot sterilized half-pint jars. Cover with the boiling syrup and seal at once.

Zucchini Pickles

1 Quart Distilled Vinegar - white
2 Cups Sugar
1/4 Cup Salt
2 Teaspoons Celery Seed
2 Teaspoons Ground Turmeric
1 Teaspoon Dry Mustard
5 Pounds Zucchini -- unpeeled - cut 1/4 inch slices
1 Quart Onions - thinly sliced
Combine first 6 ingredients; bring to a boil. Pour over zucchini and onions; let stand 1 hour, stirring occasionally. In saucepot, bring mixture to a boil, then simmer 3 minutes. Continue simmering while quickly packing one clean, hot jar at a time.
Fill to within 1/2” of top making sure vinegar solution covers vegetables. Cap each jar at once. Process 5 minutes in boiling-water bath. Makes 6 -7 pints. Print this post