The fruits of our labour

We drove through Salmon Arm a few weekends ago on our way home from Sunpeaks and as I previously mentioned, we stopped at DeMille's Farm Market. We've been stopping at Demille's for a few years now - they have a fabulous little petting zoo for Lily and they offer good prices on their #2 (read: not perfect) fruits and vegetables. Buying #2 produce is a great way to buy large quantities of fruits and vegetables in order to can and preserve them for winter.  For example: I bought 50 lbs of tomatoes for $20 and 20 lbs of peaches for $8 - sure, both were a little bruised and battered but the cost-savings was well worth it!

Canning and preserving might seem a little old-fashioned but it is really nice to have jars of homemade salsa and canned peaches throughout the winter. I'm not going to lie - canning is a fair amount of work! It is not hard to do but it is time-consuming. It's best done with girlfriends and a few glasses of wine but since I'm knocked up (as was one of my canning partners), we settled for lots of yummy snacks while we made salsa, peaches, and mango chutney. 

I have no idea where this salsa recipe is originally from but my friend Julie passed it along to me a few years ago. I've pretty much followed the recipe as outlined although I only added as many peppers as I had on hand (more red/orange/yellow peppers and less hot peppers). I'm a huge fan of corn and black bean salsa so we added a can of each, right at the end of the cooking time. 

A few tips:

1. Wear gloves when chopping the hot peppers! I have learned from past mistakes and am now exceedingly careful about not rubbing my eyes after chopping hot peppers. However, I thought that I could get away without rubber gloves and wow, was I wrong!!! My chopping hand was on FIRE for the rest of the night and no amount of Google-researched solutions worked to take that pain away. 

2. If this is your first time canning, see if you have any friends or family who can help you out. Scott's cousin Kelly helped me a few years ago when I first learned to can - her tips made a big difference! If you have no-one to assist you, check out the Bernardin Home Canning website for a how-to guide.  

I've never posted a scanned recipe into this blog so I'm not sure if this will work. I think that you should be able to click on the recipe image to make it larger or to print it off.


Notes to self from September 2013:
1. Using 60 lbs of tomatoes, use 10 cans each of corn and black beans.
2. Used 12 jalapeño peppers, 3 Habenero peppers, 4 hot red peppers, and 4 hot yellow peppers (approx) but this wasn't hot enough. Also used approx. 60 sweet peppers of assorted colours. Consider using 30 hot peppers?! Total pounds of peppers was 23 pounds.
3. Used organic tomatoes from Farm Box. Total cost per 500 ml jar was approx. $2.50