Salsa 2015

This year, I canned my favorite (and most difficult) item to put up: salsa.   It's the one thing I make that I can't seem to have enough of in the house.  This year, we ran out about April, so I made 33 pints.   I bought a box of Roma tomatoes from Ruhlig's produce and commenced to prepare my favorite salsa recipe Salsa #5.  I had to scale up the recipe based on the amount of tomatoes I had in my box, which was 26.3 lb, or about 3.78X the original recipe.   It's very important to keep proportions accurate when making salsa, or you could end up with botulism.  Here is my math:

It also was the maiden voyage on my new outdoor canning kitchen.  I did break it in at a canning class that I taught last weekend.  It was great to be able to can outside on such a hot day, plus, I could just hose off the garage floor when I was done.   I still did all my chopping in my own kitchen, but I peeled the tomatoes on my camp stove instead of in the house and it was way better.   Plus, the propane high burner can get my canner boiling in no time.  

I ultimately used 2 boiling water baths at a time, which made the whole project, start to finish, get completed in a little over 4 5 hours.   My friend Ellen stopped by to help for a couple hours.

 Ready for winter now!!!