During last week's canning madness, tomatoes went on super sale at one of the local markets. I could not resist; they were Romas. I went into full tomato canning mode. I decided it was time to make salsa. Now some of you may be scratching your heads looking at this ingredients picture as there are no tomatoes in this one. Well that is because I also wanted to try my hand at peach salsa this year as well. I cut up all the ingredients that both salsas shared in the morning and then cooked them up that afternoon. I made one critical error however.
After cutting up all the peppers, onion, and garlic, I peeled the peaches and started to notice my hands were tingling a bit. I decided to ignore this and start cooking up the peach salsa. My hands seemed to be on fire, but I just thought it was the overly hot day and the hot items on the stove. I gave it no thought as I stirred away and then put the very pretty peach salsa in the jars. I loved the way the colors all complimented each other in this salsa. It looked pretty and while I did not taste test it, the salsa also looked mighty tasty.
The burning started to get worse as I was working on cleaning up from this batch of salsa to prepare for the other one. By this time two hours had passed from the cutting of ingredients to now, and as I washed off the pots and canning equipment, the burning got worse. It was then that I realized the error of my ways. I had cut all the jalapeno peppers with no gloves on... all six of them. Now it is a big joke around the house and family as to my whimpiness when it comes to spicy food, but at this point I was in full on pain. I was having an allergic reaction to the capsaicin in the peppers.
Now some of you may be wondering why this did not happen last year, and I was doing this too as I was trying to wash off my hands as well as I could. Then it dawned on me that my wonderful husband had cut them last year and had a similar, all be it less crazy, reaction to the capsaicin. After much soap and water, nothing was improving. I turned my attention to milk. I rinsed and soaked my hands in milk. All seemed to be fine. We left to go out to the Eat Real fest for lunch.
Once in the fest, I thought all was okay. I figured that at this point the burning was just part of my mind thinking it was still burning. I hoped that the distractions of the food and festivities would make it all go away as it was just in my mind after all. Wrong! Dead wrong. The burning came back with a vengeance. My hands started to swell and turn purple. It was time for some serious intervention. We returned home quickly and moved up in butter fat, from skim milk to half and half!
After repeated dunks into the half and half interspersed with alcohol scrubbing, my hands finally were free of the burn. It was a six hour odyssey of skin numbing pain, but it was finally over. I vowed to only use the food processor or rubber gloves from here on out when touching any spicy peppers. It was then time to cook up the tomato salsa. I slipped the skins off the tomatoes using boiling water and then an ice bath. Boy did that ice bath feel good. It helped with the residual swelling that my hands were still experiencing.
From there it was just dicing of the peeled tomatoes and then adding in all the already prepped vegetables into the pot for their cook and then filling up the jars and water bath time. I was happy to see this project end. I ended up with some left over in the pot for this batch, so I let it cool in the fridge. The taste test of the left overs made me very happy and made Dan ask why I did not make more. This salsa was much improved over last year's salsa debacle. I cannot wait to pop open a jar of the peach to see how that one tastes. I need to remember to save some from now on to taste later. I guess my zeal to stop the burning of my hands and to finish off two canning projects in one day just took over. The pantry is starting to fill up to capacity, but there are more projects to show off and still finish. Check back tomorrow for tomatoes day two!
It looked a little like a tomato stampede when I started unpacking the bags of tomatoes in the kitchen. They were piled up on counters and even took over the top most counter top. I did, however can this batch as whole tomatoes only. It took another trip buying just as many to get to the sauce portion of the canning. These went whole into jars. I only took a few jars last year during my canning with Annie and ran out faster than I thought I would. This year, being solo, I had to make a decision as to how many cans to make up. At first, I thought about doing around five maximum, but I quickly changed my mind when I thought about Dan's homemade chili and other yummy slow cooker recipes I like to make in the fall and winter when I get busy with crafting, tutoring, and dance studio things.
All the tomatoes had to be peeled, and this year the boiling water bath worked for all but two tomatoes. Out of 10 pounds of tomatoes, I would say that two not peeling easily was true luck. I think part of the success with peeling this year was due to me not over crowding the pot with too many tomatoes. Last year when it was the two of us working, we filled the pot up pretty full with tomatoes. I was, however concerned as I ran out of ice for the water bath. It took a lot of water changes, but the tomatoes did cool down eventually. The longer time they had heated up may have also contributed to the faster peeling since I have a tendency to pull things earlier than I should.
After peeling, it was time to core them out. Dan helped out a bit with this step. I think he felt a little bad for me working with this volume of tomatoes alone. It was nice to have a helping hand get me through this stage faster than the previous ones. The process became more streamlined and assembly machine like at this point. I would peel and set down on the cutting board, he would core them, and then the prepared tomatoes would go into the bowl. I was happy to see that the tomatoes were not just red skinned but also had nice red flesh through out the whole tomato. Nothing is worse than a ripe looking tomato that turns out to be tasteless and pink in the middle.
Next the tomatoes went into the canning kettle with water for their boil. I am wondering if I just don't boil them enough the first time, if I am bad at packing jars, or if I just do not pour off enough liquid the first time when packing the jars because this year I had tomato float again. It was rather frustrating. It caused me to actually lose sleep and begin to ponder if I have a canning perfection problem. 
I ended up getting up the next day to open up all the cans, repacking, and reprocessing them all. My 12 cans went down to the eight you see here. Now they are nicely packed as I want them to look, but the tomatoes may end up being more stewed rather than whole tomatoes as I did two heat processes on them. As always, I did add the extra lemon juice to make sure there was enough acid in the tomato jars to make them safe for water bath canning. Hopefully eight will be enough. ;) For now I am off to sneak more boxes of cans into the house. Then it is off to 826 for tutoring and the dance studio. When will crafting get done around here again? Not till canning season is over I suppose.
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