Playing Catch-Up

During the course of the past week and a half that I have been dodging this blog, I embarked on some interesting projects. Me and my friend S (she had never canned before) did some canning. We made grape jelly from scratch, apple butter, and two batches of applesauce. Some pictures where taken and unfortunately a lot was never taken.

We used the recipes from the Ball Blue Book as well as the recipe that you get in the box of Certo pectin.

We used the Certo recipe for grape jelly, but instead of using Concord grapes, a mixture of green and red seedless grapes were substituted. This yielded a lovely jelly with a potent grape flavor and a pretty shade of pink.






The applesauce recipe was from the Ball book, and it came out well. I opted to add cinnamon because my husband requested it. The second batch I added some ground cloves and cinnamon. I had a second batch of applesauce because I had so many red delicious apples (20 lbs.). I also had a great idea to put some of the applesauce into the small 4 oz. jelly jars so that I could just grab one to put in his lunch box. This has really worked out well in the mornings!

The apple butter recipe I used the ingredients and processing time from the Ball book. The flavor is phenomenal. The recipe lacked two major things: the estimated cooking time and how to tell when the butter is ready. The recipe read along these lines "Cook slowly until thick enough to round up on a spoon." This was not helpful...in the least.

I then consulted another canning book Jellies, Jams, and Chutneys fortunately this book was a lot more helpful. The butter is done when you spoon some out on a clean plate and let it cool and there is no liquid ring around the butter. I can work with that. The time indications in that book weren't very helpful either. I cooked the butter for 3 hours, and it still wasn't close to being ready. I was hopeful it would thicken up after canning it and cooling it, so I canned it. It wasn't any better a day later.

I began to search the internet for recipes/cooking times/examples of butter and stumbled upon a recipe on www.pickyourown.org. In this recipe the author puts the butter in the crock pot for 6 to 12 hours. This was the answer.

Unfortunately, I never think to take pictures while actually ladling, measuring, and sealing. One of these days I'll have a friend be here just to take pictures.