It's A Good (Safe) Tired...

 

Before you worry, I've been behaving. Handsome does all the heavy lifting (bless his heart), and I do what I can safely accomplish without risking my recuperation. Most of our tomatoes have gone to the freezer to process later, but a friend who lives up the road had an overabundance of tomatoes that she graciously shared with us. I decided we should process these right away because they were just that gorgeous. BTW- we bartered some of my canned goods for the tomatoes. Everybody was happy with that arrangement!

I've been revisiting our pantry to see what I typically purchase that we could replace with our own homemade version, and one of the things I found were cans of Rotel Tomatoes and Chili Peppers. I usually add this to our enchilada dishes or other Mexican fare. I found a great recipe from THIS website

and we ended up processing 25 cups of tomatoes (run through our food processor), 8 jalapeños (also chopped), and the rest of the incredients called for in the recipe.

When all was said and done, we had nineteen 12 oz. jars of beautiful homemade rotel fresh from the water bath canner. It's already on the pantry shelf now.

 

 

Andy and Shelly found a sweet corn stand and shared some of their corn with us. We got a call when they went back to see if we wanted more, so I asked them to bring three dozen ears for us. Over the weekend, eighteen ears were processed into creamed corn (We already have canned sweet corn, but if I want to make corn casserole it also calls for a can of creamed corn). The cream and butter are added to these jars when it's time to cook them, not in the canning process. You can see we ended up with seven and a half pints.

We also did another batch of Corn and Black Bean Salsa with some of the remaining corn, and ten cobs were blanched and then vacuum-sealed for the freezer. We're set with sweet corn for the winter now!

Today Handsome and I will be baking bread, but I'll likely can sliced green tomatoes, too. I found a recipe from the same site as the Rotel copycat recipe to can the green tomatoes so they can be used later for fried green tomatoes! As I seriously doubt that many of the remaining tomatoes will ripen on the vine, this is a perfect solution to enjoy them all winter long!

By the time our day is done, we'll have four loaves of bread and multiple jars of sliced green tomatoes. I'll share photos tomorrow. I know when we're though, I'll be a really nice tired, and be very grateful for my dear husband who helped every step of the way.