Category: Food

First time canning plums

I canned plum halves fort he first time in my life

First I tried the American style boiling water method, which means canning in just boiling water for a certain amount of time, but I think I had the water boiling to vigorously. The fruit fell apart (on the left in the picture), but it still tasted wonderful in my yoghurt.

Then I tried the German (Weck) style boiling water method. That is cooking at 90°C for 30 Min. Now the fruit is still as fruit in tact and looks more appealing (on the right in the picture). With the American style batch I did not fill enough fruit in the jar, which I did better with the batch I did with the German style boiling water method.

Besides canning I also froze some plums and made some plum sauce, partially combined with apple sauce, (which I also canned). So we will be enjoying some summer fruit in winter.

Pressure canned vegetable soup

What did I do wrong???????

In the fall I had pressure canned a few vegetable soups, with vegetables from my garden, according to the recipe I usually make. The soups taste horrible. Only the smell after heating the soup is so terrible, we did not even want to try the soup.

Only the pumpkin soup is eatable. It does not taste as good as freshly made pumpkin soup, but we can eat it. The other soups landed on the compost. It is such a shame of the work and all of the ingredients.

I do not know what I did wrong. I had watched several videos of people pressure canning vegetable soups and those soups looked appealing and the vegetables still had some colour. Did I pressure can with to much pressure? Did I pressure can a wrong ingredient? Was there still too much fat in the bone broth? I will have to find out before I try to pressure can vegetables again.

Baking bread without a regular oven

While travelling we don’t want to go without homemade bread. We have found this nice solution. An Omnia oven.

The Omnia oven is an oven for on the gas stove. I have been trying this out and it works great. The temperature right underneath the lid does not reach the temperature you would normally bake bread with, but on a higher setting the bottom of the bread will burn. After finding the right setting for the gas burner, the baking of the bread takes only a bit longer as it would in a regular oven.

Obviously the Omnia oven is not only for baking bread. It can be used for almost anything you would use a regular oven for. The size of the food is limiting. A chicken or anything like that does not fit inside, but, among other things, cookies, a cake or lasagna are possible. Things we are going to try out in the near future.