Winter project: canning spaghetti sauce

Pretty much every family has its recipes, the ones passed down through the generations, modified by each cook, and treasured (or occasionally dreaded) by each new generation of kids. In my family there are only two of these, and both began, as far as I know, with my mother. One of them is the family spaghetti sauce recipe.

I learned to cook by helping my mother in the kitchen, starting when I was maybe 4 or 5. I liked cooking project days, when I would get in the way help Mom assemble whatever vat o' goodness she was making that day. I was always especially happy when it was spaghetti sauce day, because (like pretty much every American kid), I loved spaghetti. I especially loved the mushrooms in the sauce, so my dad would pick the mushrooms out of his portion and give them to me.

Once I was on my own, I asked my mother for her spaghetti sauce recipe. Of course she didn't have one--she just made it from memory, with a pinch of this and a glop of that, and it turned out magical. I made it with her one afternoon, and she tried to identify actual quantities, but of course the results were never quite the same as when she made it. So I fiddled with it over the years until it became my spaghetti sauce.

The recipe below makes about 7 quarts, which happens to be exactly what my pressure canner will hold (this is not a coincidence). You can make smaller or larger amounts as you wish and freeze it instead of can it if you prefer. Quantities of stuff are also negotiable. If you hate mushrooms, you're wrong you can leave those out. Whatever. It's spaghetti sauce, not a chemistry experiment. There are, however, a few caveats if you're going to can the stuff:

• You *must* use a pressure canner. This stuff has meat in it along with low-acid vegetables. It's a breeding ground for botulism. Do not try to can anything with meat or low-acid anything in a boiling-water canner. If you want to can spaghetti sauce in a boiling water bath, follow a meatless recipe designed for boiling-water-bath canning such as this one from the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

• This recipe is not an "official" "approved" home canning recipe. Normally that's a big no-no. I get around it by following the processing directions for the ingredient with the longest recommended processing time--the ground beef. You can find pressure canning recipes for meat sauce with shorter processing times, but since mine hasn't been laboratory-tested, I play it safe. My new year's resolution every year is to not give my family botulism. So far I have a 100% success rate with that one (we won't discuss my success rate with other resolutions). If you have any concerns about canning, just freeze it. I do that frequently when I'm too lazy to hassle with canning, and it works just fine.

OK, here we go:

The recipe

3 large onions, chopped

3 medium bell peppers, chopped

3 or so jalapenos or other chilies, minced (optional - add if you like a little heat with your spaghetti)

6-8 cloves of garlic, minced (or to taste)

About 90 oz tomatoes, fresh or canned. If using fresh, peel, core, and roughly chop them.

48 oz. tomato sauce

18 oz. tomato paste

3 heaping tbsp dried basil (or to taste - I often add more)

2 heaping tbsp dried oregano (or to taste - again, I often add more. I have a heavy hand with herbs.)

About 4 tsp salt or to taste

1 tsp pepper or to taste

24 oz. sliced fresh mushrooms (or more or less or none - whatever you like)

3 lbs. ground beef, browned and drained

Toss all of the above into a big (and I do mean *big*) stockpot and simmer for a few hours. Or do what I do: put it in a couple of slow cookers (I use one huge one and one smaller one; it fills both) and cook it on low for about 8-10 hours. I like to start the slow cookers at bedtime, let them cook all night, and can the sauce in the morning.

To can, follow the directions for pressure canning that came with your canner, adjusting for altitude if needed. As noted above, I use the processing time and pressure instructions for canning ground beef to be sure my sauce isn't under-processed. Makes about 7 quarts.

Don’t toss that turkey carcass! Make broth instead.

A belated happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

If you’re like me, you’ve been eating turkey since yesterday, and the turkey carcass is probably starting to look a little bare. But don’t pitch it yet! I like to keep a little bit of Thanksgiving with me all year long, by treasuring that extra stuffing-induced belly fat. Well, OK, I don’t really treasure it, but I do seem to keep it with me. I also keep a bit of Thanksgiving around in the form of turkey broth, which (most years) lasts me until the following Thanksgiving, when I use the last of it to flavor the Thanksgiving Day stuffing. Dontcha love it when things work out neatly like that? Yes, I used to alphabetize my records when I was a kid (note for those of you under 30: records are big round black things made of vinyl that play music for approximately 3 days till they scratch or warp or your best friend’s kid sister gets hold of them and turns them into something that looks like an Etch-A-Sketch. I may forgive her for what she did to my Pyromania album, but I’ll never forget.).

Oops, I digress. Anyway, back to broth-making. You can substitute homemade turkey broth for chicken broth in almost any recipe, which can save you quite a bit of money throughout the year. And broth is brain dead easy to make.

First, make it within a couple days of Thanksgiving. You don’t want your broth to taste like old, stale turkey.

Next, gather your supplies.

What you need

• A big pot. Big enough to hold your turkey carcass (and maybe your best friend’s kid sister).
• A turkey carcass (duh)
• Water - enough to cover the turkey carcass.
• A recipe. Grab a recipe for chicken stock from your nearest cookbook or Chef Google and scale it up based on the size of your turkey. Broth-making is not a precision operation, so don’t agonize about quantities of stuff.
• Whatever stuff your recipe calls for. I’ll give you a few hints that a lot of recipes may not include:
• You can use celery tops and bottoms and scraps for the celery. It’s a great way to use up stuff you’d otherwise compost.
• If you use white or yellow onions, you can leave the skins on. Just cut off the roots and any outer layers that are dirty or moldy, quarter what’s left, and throw it in the pot. The skins from yellow onions will help give your broth a nice yellow color.
• You can leave the stems on parsley. They’ll add flavor. Ditto for any other fresh herbs you use.
• Use your old, limp, sorry-looking carrots that have been in the vegetable bin since last Easter. As long as they aren’t moldy or rotten, they’re fine for broth.
• If you didn’t use them for gravy or doggie snacks, throw in the giblets, heart, and neck--but not the liver. The liver will make your broth taste liver-y. Blech.
• Don’t chop anything, just cut it into chunks. You’re going to strain your broth, so big pieces are actually better.

Here’s today’s pot o’ broth. Everything’s in the pan and ready to start cooking.

After you’ve boiled everything for awhile, strain the broth with a colander or big sieve. Line the colander with cheesecloth if you want clearer broth.

Here's the broth all strained and tidy:

Don’t throw the stuff you strained out away. Not yet, because you can boil it all again for a second batch of broth. Add new vegetables, herbs, etc., and boil this batch longer. You want the flavor and minerals to boil out of the bones. Strain it as before once it’s done.

Chill your broth and skim the fat from the top. Separate the turkey meat from the bones and soggy veggies. You can throw away the bones and veggies and use the meat for soup or something else.

Preserving your broth

Unless you have your very own Brady Bunch (RIP, Florence Henderson), you won’t be able to use that much broth all at once. That leaves you with a few options:

• Freeze the broth
• Can the broth
• Use the broth to make soup or something else that you freeze or can.

Freezing is easy, but you need freezer space to accommodate your gallons o’ broth. If that’s not a problem, freeze your broth in whatever size containers best suit the amount of broth you normally use at a time. If you use tiny amounts, you can freeze some in ice trays and put the cubes in a freezer bag. I usually freeze some in pints and some in quarts.

Canning broth requires a pressure canner. You cannot can broth or other low-acid foods safely in a boiling water bath. Most pressure canner instruction manuals include a recipe for chicken stock that you can use, or you can find one online. Note: if you look online, only use a recipe from a reputable source. Reputable sources include freshpreserving.com (the Ball and Kerr site), the National Center for Home Food Preservation, or any USDA Extension Service site.

Those last two paragraphs also apply to soups. You can use your broth in any soup recipe that calls for chicken broth. If you’re canning, just be sure you use a recipe from a reputable source. I know families are annoying, but killing them with botulism is a little extreme.

Here are a couple of recipes from trusted sources that you can try if you have a pressure canner:

• Canning Meat Stock, from the National Center for Home Food Preservation
• Homemade Chicken Soup, from freshpreserving.com

One final but very important note: If you’ve never pressure-canned before, follow the directions that came with your canner exactly. Also read:

• The Principles of Home Canning (National Center for Home Food Preservation)
• Using Pressure Canners (National Center for Home Food Preservation)

I also recommend the Ball Blue Book, which has both canning instructions and recipes.

Pressure canning isn’t scary (it’s actually really fun!), but it does carry some risks. If you follow up-to-date instructions from a reliable source and use appropriate equipment in good repair, you’ll be fine.

Now go get that carcass and make some broth!

Watermelon rind pickles!

I started learning to preserve around the time I started learning to garden--when I was about 4 or 5 years old. We lived in a one-bedroom milker's cottage outside of Tracy, California--my hometown. Tracy is in the San Joaquin Valley, which has some of the richest farmland in the world. We were poor, so we raised as much of our own food as possible--beef, chickens, turkeys, and, of course, vegetables. Some of my earliest memories are of trailing along beside my mother, planting hills of squash in what passed for our front yard.

One of the advantages of living in farm country is that you often have access to lots of produce in large quantities, whether you grow it yourself, buy it for cheap, or glean in the fields after the harvesters come through. So like most farm kids, I shelled a lot of beans and ate a lot of home-canned tomatoes, home-canned black-eyed peas, home-canned lima beans, and home-canned anything else my mother could get her hands on. As soon as I was old enough to be more of a help than a nuisance, I was enlisted as kitchen assistant. And so I learned to can.

When I was around middle-school age, we'd moved to town, but we still gardened, and every now and then Dad would still glean in the tomato fields. And I had graduated from kitchen assistant to tomato-canner-in-chief, since I was home all summer with "nothing better to do" (apparently watching The Price is Right and Family Feud didn't count as something better to do). So I got to can tomatoes--lots of tomatoes, tons of tomatoes, a positive plethora of tomatoes--in a hot kitchen in triple-digit heat. Thank heaven for our swamp cooler, or I probably would have passed out face-down in the pressure canner.

For some odd reason, I have fond memories of canning (masochism? Stockholm Syndrome?), so I picked it up as a hobby around the time my son was born over 18 years ago. I started with jam then bought a pressure canner and started preserving anything that would stand still long enough (my family have learned to stay out of my way when the canner and jars come out). I didn't have much of a vegetable garden this year--damn  grasshoppers!--but in my usual determined (deranged) fashion, I still found something to can. A few weeks ago, it was apple pie filling using apples gleaned (the nut doesn't fall far from the tree) from--I kid you not--a local dentist's office. They have several large apple trees on the property, and they let people pick the apples. I wonder what the dentist would have thought if he'd seen the 2.7 million pounds of sugar that went into my apple pie filling--but I digress.

After spending about 12 hours processing and canning apples, I never wanted to see another one of the dang things, but I still needed to feed my canning addiction. A trip to the local produce market revealed watermelons on sale. Watermelons. In Flagstaff. In November. Uh huh. But I couldn't resist pretending it's summer for a few more days, so I bought one. The watermelon itself was less than thrilling (duh, it's November), but it gave me an excuse to try something I've been curious about for years: watermelon rind pickles. I always figured they'd be nasty, but I tried some at a craft fair a couple of weeks ago and discovered they are delicious. And so, after an hour or so of peeling and cutting rind and 6 hours of brining and a couple hours of cooking, I have: 3 pints. 3 whole pints from the rind of an entire watermelon. *sigh* One of the hazards of preserving is losing heart when you see how much you started with, how much work you did... and how much you actually end up with. The cure is to crack open a jar and savor the delicious fruit of your labors.

If you want to make watermelon pickles, it's easy to find a recipe. I used the one in my Ball Blue Book, but you can find a bunch of them online, including some with illustrated instructions. There's a recipe on the Ball site that's similar to the one I used, only mine includes other spices besides cinnamon. And since they only need a boiling water bath, you don't need a canner--just a large pot. What are you waiting for? Get a watermelon and get canning!