Over the past year or so my daughters and son-in-law have become interested in the art and science of sustainable living so we agreed that we would get together to do something towards producing things for ourselves and help them learn how to do it, so we decided on a preserving day. Like a lot of people these days we have become somewhat insular and as a family we all get together mainly for special occasions like Christmas and birthdays etc, so the opportunity to get together as a family and have some fun as well as being productive was too good to refuse.
I have more than a few books on food preserving (check out the library tab for a list) so we had a bit of a wander through those to decide what we wanted to make on the day. One of the easiest things to start bottling with is just plain tomato pasta sauce, and my elder daughter had a hankering to make strawberry jam so we would go with those and see what else we would manage.
Before the day there was some work required to set up what we would need to have on hand so the day would go well.
Produce – The two basics I would need were tomatoes and strawberries. Where we live in Western Sydney gives us access to fruit and vegetables directly from the farm gate, and I knew that there was a farmer selling tomatoes comparatively cheaply so I went and picked a couple of bags up from him. I had got some really ripe ones from our local green grocer as well but I tend to over cater. All up we did pretty well for tomatoes.
The strawberries were initially a bit different with a standard price of$4 a punnet, I got some from the local green grocer again, but when I was driving to get the tomatoes I saw a fruit stall with local strawberries for $6 a bucket. This was too good to pass up! Moral of story – when you are out driving around in fruit and veggie growing areas, keep an eye out for bargains remembering that you can preserve them if you get too big a load to consume at one time
I also noticed some very nice chillies and red capsicums going somewhat cheaply at our local green grocers as well so I picked up some of them, working on the idea that they could be useful.
Packaging – We quite often use recycled glass jars and lids to do our preserving in but Most of ours were already full and I knew the kids wouldn’t have any so I did a bit of checking around and found that a local company called Plasdene (see the links section) would sell food jars to the public. So I went down to their showroom and had a look through. You have to buy a minimum order of $100 so after I looked through their extensive stock I decided on 250ml jars for the jam, 500ml jars for the tomato pasta sauce and 375ml jars for general preserving and two boxes of each plus accompanying lids (charged separately) and I had spent just over $100. This also meant I had a huge amount of jars but I planned on splitting them up between all three families so it would be OK.
Bear in mind that while we do our share of preserving, I tend to do most of the work by myself so when all of a sudden I had extra hands it was great! My elder daughter cut up the tomatoes, while I fed them into the thick bottomed stainless steel pot we use to prepare pasta sauce and my son-in-law cut up the strawberries ready for the frying pan. My younger daughter was in need of some sewing tuition on her new sewing machine so that did tend to consume my wife and younger daughter and occasionally elder daughter as well, throughout the day.
The pasta sauce recipe and process are covered in an article in the food processing section of this site (under the Food Preserving tab), the strawberry jam was a very simple recipe that basically called for ¾ of a cup of sugar per 500 grams of fruit then cook it until it sets. This is considerably less than the usual 1 for 1 sugar to fruit recipe but we gave it a go and while it tastes WONDERFUL we did need to add in 25 grams or so of Jamsetta (pectin), it is still a bit runny, but hey, it spreads well.
Once the sauce and jam were finished we packed them off into their respective jars and processed them in boiling water for 45 minutes. I marshalled my minions again and got them cutting up the rest of the tomatoes, the capsicum and the chillies and my son-in-law had brought some of his basil and thyme so we threw that in as well and cooked them up to make another batch of different flavoured pasta sauce. He also found some time to make flavoured vinegars, made by adding the herbs to good red wine vinegar.
One of the big problems that I find with cooking up the preserving stuff by myself is that I tend to be doing several jobs at once – you housewives out there will know what I am talking about – but not being female I have trouble multitasking. This means that even though we use thick bottomed cooking pots and even various implements to spread the heat from the gas flame more evenly I invariably burn the bottom and wind up with some black bits that need to be removed, often with some considerable difficulty. With the extra personnel we were able to have wooden spoons stirring all of the pots all of the time. Magic!
Once all of the sauce and jam was bottles we divided up the spoils. It was a great way of spending time with the family and a very productive day, in fact it was so much fun that we decided to do it every month, the next one will be a lolly and sweet making day........I can’t wait!