Canning...

Mom and Dad brought home lots of produce from my aunt and uncle's orchards. There were apples, pears, and plums. Tuesday, Trudi, Marian, and I started with the two five-gallon buckets of plums first, since they were ripe. Well, really it was three but this is all that's left of the third bucket:



Who knew that there were 4 gallons of water in there?!

The buckets had been sitting for a while and so we knew there would be some losses. So..we filled the bathtub full of water and dumped the buckets in. Did you know the bathtub was a canning accessory? It made a rather disgusting mess:



Then I sat and sorted, and sorted, and sorted:





And this was the "splat" left from the sorting:



It's a combination of rotten fruit and crushed beyond useful fruit.
Then the three of us sat and halved and pitted the fruits. We all had dirty hands then so there are no pictures. We also put together the two recipes. We tried plum ketchup and asian plum sauce. Neither behaved as expected at the time. Marian says the ketchup is good now and she went ahead and canned it. She was going to work on the Asian plum sauce yesterday or today. No news yet on how that's turning out.

Together we only used 8 cups of plums...it barely made a dent! It was readily apparent that we were never going to get through the rest of the fruit in one evening so we packaged it up in gallon ziplocks and put it in the freezer. I think there were 5 bags left.



Trudi and I left the sauces simmering on the stove.



The ketchup is in front and the asian sauce is in back...I think. It could be the other way around. They were similar enough in appearance that it's impossible to tell.

Marian says the ketchup now looks like this:



Tomorrow brings new adventures in canning. Currently I'm brining pickle relish so that I just need to boil it in the vinegar and can it tomorrow...I hope.


This picture also illustrates why we don't do this at my house. That is the entirety of my kitchen counter space.