Monday, August 10, 2009

A new bin



Friday was Bin Day. I'm telling you it makes my day to get these bins full of goodies. We got some cabbage, romaine, sweet corn, cucumber, cherry tomatoes, green beans, pluots :), peaches, and the best Michigan blueberries I've tasted in a while. Last night we sampled the cabbage with homemade fish tacos with blueberries and vanilla pudding for dessert. We kicked it up a bit this week by ordering 6 pounds of green beans. For Canning! It was awesome!

I called Mom to get the recipe. She did what she calls, Cold Pack. That is to say, not boiling the beans first. Per Mom, I sterilized the jars, then stuffed them full of green beans, then covered with boiling water, then sprinkled a bit of salt and capped them off. Then I put them in the pressure canner with about 3 inches of water, started boiling, and when Steam appeared, popped on the pressurizer until it hit 11 pounds of pressure. We kept it roughly there for 25 minutes before cutting the heat and letting it cool down.

Turns out 6 pounds of fresh beans yields 6 quarts of canned beans. Only 1 didn't pop, so we'll have to eat that one soon...Darn. They look so pretty too!



Christopher enlisted himself in helping out, and at first I thought it was going to go badly because the first thing he did was break one in half and through it ends and all in my bucket. But we developed a system, and I'd snap off the ends and give it to him to break into bite size pieces, though his idea of bite size is really funny. He sampled his first bite size ones. I was like Ewww...who wants raw green beans. But he offered one to me, and I was like, OK, gotta show him veggies are good, so I'll try it.

It was Good! Who'd have thought? Kind of like a sugar snap pea, a little less sugary.

And he became quite adept at Bean Snapping.



Chris really enjoyed helping me snap beans, and I'll admit his company made it a lot more fun!

2 comments:

Andrea said...

My mother-in-law cans green beans for us every year and I give them to Hannah. I keep them special for Hannah because my strange little girl loves to eat unsalted, cold, canned green beans.

Oh and I totally agree about the Michigan blueberries this year. We are usually up in Michigan a few times during the summer for family stuff and they are the best we've had in a couple of years. Yum!

Unknown said...

Wow that stash looks good!!