It's the middle of summer, and although it's a cool one for Southern California (low 70's), my brother and sister had enough home grown tomatoes (roughly 3-4 lbs. of varying sizes) to use in our "Great Canning Experiment". We made 7-1/2 pints of tomatoes in their own juice, and 4-1/2 pints of strawberry-kiwi jam. My canner is quite large, but it did the job (even if it did take quite a bit of energy to bring up to a boil). We used the boiling method for canning the 1/2 pint jars of goodness.
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For the tomatoes, we parboiled them for roughly 30 seconds, transferred them to a bowl of cold water, and then skinned them.
We then placed 2-3 into 1/2 pint jars, squeezed them to release the juice, capped them, and placed the jars into the boiling water bath in the pressure cooker/canner for 1 hour and 20 minutes. As you can see, there is "extra" room for more ... we placed the jam jars in for the last 10 minutes.
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Success!! Next time we plan to make crushed tomatoes, and we can continue experimenting with the abundant fruit ripening in the backyard. We only had one jar of tomoatoes that did not seal. The strawberry-kiwi jam? I believe we ended up with compote for waffles, pancakes, ice cream as the jam didn't gel completely ... we need to work more with our fruit/sugar/pectin ratios ... but I'm happy with sweet strawberry-kiwi compote!!
