One of the jobs I completed recently was to bring all our preserves up from the garage and store them in our new pantry. Our garage is downstairs, under the house. I have a big wooden cupboard down there where I used to store our preserves but frankly it was a pain to have to trek up and down the outside stairs with jars and all the bottling equipment. Bring on the kitchen renovation, the new big pantry and an afternoon's organisation.
For reference, what you see before you is all of our vacola jars, minus 4 of the tall ones, which are currently clean and sitting in the cupboard. They had been full of last summer's tomato passata but are now empty and available. We also use recycled glass jars, but mostly buy new lids to put on the jars. We get the lids from Green living Australia.
So the inventory below is:
- 3 jars olives,
- 15 jars of apple butter
- 2 jars plums
- 1 jar spiced pears
- 12 small jars tomato passata
- 20 large jars tomato passata
- 6 jars chicken stock
- 1 jar of slow cooked biodynamic lamb stew
We've had the fowler's vacola for about 16 years, the tomato passata maker since my birthday in 2005, and now the pressure cooker canner since June 2011. In order to store stock, stews, and soups you do need to have a pressure cooker as the hot water bath method doesn't kill enough germs in the low acid foods.
Tim's got a birthday coming up and he asked for more trays for the dehydrator. What a laugh we are. Still..we are enjoying having easy access to our preserving equipment in the new big kitchen. May as well enjoy it before the bloom wears off.
Some years we do lots of preserving (like above). Some years, not so much, like below, from the 2008 harvest.
