Alaska on my mind…

Well, Once in a While Canning is more appropriate.

Peter Piper picked a peck of sweet red peppers and gave them to us. So we busied ourselves and pickled them. They are the sweetest peppers I think I’ve ever had.

Lil Bit spent about three hours yesterday prepping them all, culling, washing & slicing. After work I helped her pickle them. We added some jalapeno slices and a small piece of habanero pepper to each jar for a little flair along with black pepper corns, dill seed, garlic & salt. We used 2 gallons of vinegar. She ended up with 8 qts of sliced and 3 qts of whole pickled peppers. (Because Mom broke one jar! 🥴)

This was her first time canning (with just a little direction from me) and she did a great job. She figured out how to calculate her brine using a ratio on her own too. She will be able to enter these in the fair! I’m pretty proud of her.

Besides all these lovely pepper pickles, we ended up with 8 or 9 qts in the freezer. What a bounty.

I haven’t been keeping up with our canning posts tho. Our rhubarb is looking great this year. Lush and green and full of thick stalks. We should have plenty for a big batch of wine. Last week the girls both pitched in and canned up a couple of cases of strawberry rhubarb jam with Thing 1 taking lead. They made some freezer jam, some regular sugar jam and some sugar free (keto friendly) jam. So that’s two big canning sessions in June already.

I guess it’s a good thing to be processing other foods while we’re normally processing fish. It’s been really strange being home and not living on the beach for this time period. And eating up our last few jars of canned salmon. Salmon burgers for the win last night, in the midst of making a wreck out of the kitchen. 🍔