This year I've taken a considerably reserved stance towards preserving. Beyond the lackluster harvest in a number of areas of the garden, I wanted to focus more on diversity in the pantry and, even more, FUNCTIONALITY of our larder.
What do I mean by that? Well, I used to preserve enough bread & butter pickles to last years because of all the cukes & zukes I grew. And it used a lot of space, and we honestly didn't need so many of one thing. I used to bottle gallons of homemade marinara, and then would wish I just had tomatoes instead of sauce. Guess what I did this year? (oh and tomatoes, by the way, do NOT need to be pressure canned - you can chop 'em and toss 'em in a mason jar and keep them in the freezer, or water-bath can them with a good splash of lemon juice for acidity before closing them up).
So with that, I thought about how much salsa I wanted because while I love it, I knew we did not need dozens of jars, even for the whole year. I also remembered early on how we needed different varieties of it, so I made rhubarb-marionberry salsa earlier and then, with a few days' worth of tomatoes off the vine, decided to make this mini-batch of three pints of mango chipotle salsa. Due to the lack of serranos in the garden, I experimented on the spice combo by mixing some leftover chipotles in adobo sauce I had on hand with my usual cayenne pepper and chili flakes...and it was SOOOO good. This is one of those sweet 'n' spicy salsas that I've used peaches, mangoes and even ground cherries in as the bright note in it, and this was definitely a score (or as my love said, 'the best salsa he's ever had')...yet not with so much of it that it gets tired.
Next up...apples...
"A farmer friend of mine told me recently about a busload of middle school children who came to his farm for a tour. The first two boys off the bus asked, "Where is the salsa tree?" They thought they could go pick salsa, like apples and peaches. Oh my. What do they put on SAT tests to measure this? Does anybody care? How little can a person know about food and still make educated decisions about it? Is this knowledge going to change before they enter the voting booth? Now that's a scary thought." ~ Joel Salatin
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