Two Holiday Canning Opportunities

As a result of our house being on the market for 18 months and finally moving, my pantry stock needs replenishing.  That means I am taking advantage of every home canning opportunity I can now that we are back from our vacation home.  Between Christmas and New Year's I actually had three wonderful canning opportunities.  The first two will be covered in this post and the last one in Friday's post.

We had a 22 lb turkey for our Christmas dinner.  It fed eleven of us nicely with lots of left-overs.  Some of the left-overs were used that week while the rest went into the freezer for later use.  The carcass went into the largest stock pot to make turkey stock.

Stock making is always a two day process for me if I intend canning it because I like to defat the stock before canning.  Pictured are the thirteen beautiful 500 ml (pint) jars of turkey stock fresh from the canner.  While have used the water bath canner, this was the first run of the pressure canner on my new gas stove.  I was pleasantly surprised at how much easier it was to maintain the pressure during processing!  The pressure canner worked flawlessly actually giving better results with a lot less fiddling trying to maintain the pressure.  I will never can on an electric stove again, well technically I will at our vacation home but that will not involve using a pressure canner.  It will be water bath canner only.

In our corner of beautiful southwestern Ontario we tend to get fresh cranberries in time for our Thanksgiving (2^nd Monday in October) and again just in time for Christmas.  I don't think they are great sellers here as the stores tend to bring them in, in limited quantities so if you want fresh you have to get to the stores early.  I usually buy a couple of extra bags to toss in the freezer.

I took an extra bag out of the freezer just in case I needed more sauce in addition to the fresh made sauce.  We didn't need that bag so I made an orange cranberry sauce to can.  I guestimated that the 340 g bag of thawed cranberries would give a yield of 3 cups or 3 - 250 ml (half-pint) jars.  The yield was just shy of that mark.  I processed all three jars anyway.  The next morning after cooling one of full jars failed to seal.  I have no idea why.  I've had very few seal failures over my more than 30 years of canning so the occasional one doesn't bother me.  I removed the metal two piece lid from that jar and the partially filled jar, replacing them with plastic storage lids and popped the two jars into the freezer.  The remaining sealed jar went into the pantry.

Bon Appétit!

Garden Gnome
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