Sausages in Jars

We've become huge fans of the "meat in jars" concept.  We started this last year when Dave got into making sausages, and we tried a pretty basic venison sausage recipe.  It's great opening a jar of meat and adding it to whatever you've got on the go - much quicker than having to think about taking something out of the freezer to thaw first.

This year, we played around a little with that basic sausage recipe, and came up with three new ones, two of which are in jars, and the last we made into freezer patties.  I'll give you the ingredients here for the mix, but please follow the directions from Hunter Angler Gardiner Cook's venison sausage recipe for the "how to".  Also, if your canning, please follow the pressure canning instructions for ground meat on the USDA's National Center for Home Food Preservation.

Dried Tomato & Fresh Basil Venison Sausage

4 lbs venison
1 lb pork fat
> 1 cup tightly packed fresh basil, chopped
1 head (small, about 8 cloves) garlic, peeled & chopped fine
1 medium onion, chopped
1 cup dehydrated tomatoes, chopped (we used 1/2 cup each of our dehydrated Black Plum and Principe Borghese tomatoes)
1/2 cup dehydrated bell pepper, chopped (we used our Red Ruffle peppers)
1/2 tsp dehydrated jalapeño pepper, chopped (more if you want it spicier)
1 tsp ground smoked sweet paprika
< 1 tbsp sea salt
1/2 cup cold grape juice

After making this into sausage, we canned it.

Curry Ginger Apple Venison Sausage

4 lbs venison
1 lb pork fat
1 tbsp smoked sea salt
1 1/2 tsp curry powder (my own mix)
1 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 cup dried tomatoes (Black Plum), chopped
1/2 cup dried bell pepper (Red Ruffle), chopped
1/2 cup dried apple (Gravenstein), chopped
2" fresh ginger root, grated
1 head (medium, about 12 cloves) garlic, peeled & chopped fine
1 medium onion, chopped
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup cold grape juice

After making this into sausage, we canned it.

Fruit & Maple Breakfast Venison Sausage


4 lbs venison
1 lb pork fat
1 tbsp smoked sea salt
1/2 cup each, chopped: dried cranberries, dried blueberries & dried apples

2 tbsp dehydrated bell pepper, chopped (Red Ruffle)
1/2 tsp dehydrated jalapeño pepper, chopped (more if you want it spicier)
2 tbsp fresh rosemary, chopped
1 tsp ground white peppercorns
1/2 cup cold maple syrup

After making this into sausage, we froze it into patties on wax paper-lined baking sheets, then cut the wax paper around the patties and vacuum sealed them into freezer bags.

Kitchen Whirlwind

Summer Preserves by chotda on Flickr

We've just spent the better part of this week on our feet, preparing food for the coming year.  Dave shot a small buck for us (more on that separately), and the produce from the garden has just been continuing to roll in (I'll try to compile a preserves tally again this year).

We made a discovery this year of a product for canning that I'd read about, but hadn't really investigated.  Low methoxyl (LM) pectin allows you to significantly reduce (or eliminate) the amount of sugar used in a recipe, and you can use honey, or other sweeteners (like stevia, or agave nectar or whatever) in place of sugar, because the gelling process does not require sugar to occur, unlike standard pectins.

I found Pomona's Universal Pectin at Galloway's Speciality Foods in Burnaby, so I picked up a couple of packages to try.  I had a huge batch of various berries (Oregon grape, currants, gooseberries, wild blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, evergreen huckleberries) that I needed to get out of the freezer (we're going to be getting a pig from my Dad soon), and was really keen on making a tart jelly with these fruits.

Well, I made the equivalent of six batches, and it gelled beautifully and perfectly, using little honey as the sweetener, and I made two triple batches following the directions on the package.  I did the same thing with whole strawberries and made the equivalent of seven batches all in one go!  Finally, I made a herbal jelly which I added very little honey to, and it gelled beautifully again.

Benefits of the Pomona's Universal Pectin:

• Low sugar or use sweetener of your choice.
• Beautiful gelling (although this might vary... I'll keep experimenting!) even if you make a multiple batch (unlike normal pectin which I don't have any success with because I'm always mucking with the sugar levels and am in a rush so I want to double & triple recipes!).
• Keeps indefinitely as long as properly stored (cool, dry location).

Drawbacks of the Pomona's Universal Pectin:

• Can be difficult to source (but check out their "free package" offer, to get you to encourage your local store to carry it).
• Expensive compared to regular pectin (but I'm looking into the option to purchase in bulk, as it keeps indefinitely).

Still not done yet... we've got a local source for some pears, and our Italian prune plums need dealing with, as do the tail end of our tomato harvest.  Sigh.  But it's so satisfying having all this good food available!

Canning Season Again

Jars by nicholasjon on Flickr

This is just a brief note of a list of canning & preserving links that were mentioned in the Victoria Times Colonist on Sunday, August 28, 2011:

Punk Domestics - sounds right up our alley!  Preserving, foraging, home brewing... when I've got some time (hahahaha!) this will definitely get a good look.
Well Preserved - a blog about food & foodies, with a bent towards home preserving techniques.  I like this post especially discussing safety issues around home canning, one of their first references therein is the USDA National Center for Home Preservation, my bible for all things stuck in jars.
Food in Jars - a blog about home preservation.  Some really intriguing recipes.
laundry etc. - a UK blogger's interesting collection of home-related stuff, with lots of luscious sounding recipes and lovely photos.

Another recent article in a recent Times Colonist about preserving fresh herbs.

Pickle-y Goodness

Dave & I visited family in Ottawa a couple of years back, and while we were there, we went to the Canada Agriculture Museum. While we were there, one of the demonstrators was canning up pickled carrot sticks. Before I started preserving the harvest, I wasn't that huge of a pickle fanatic; I mean, I like some pickles, but I know that some people like all kinds of pickled things. These pickled carrots were absolutely marvellous. So I knew I had to have the recipe, and lo! they had the recipe right there for us to take away.

Pickled Carrot Sticks

4 lbs carrots, peeled & cut into 4" sticks
6 fresh dill sprigs or 3 tsp dill seed
18 peppercorns
6 cloves garlic, peeled & thickly sliced
3 1/2 cups cider vinegar
2 1/2 cups water
1/3 cup honey

• Boil water, vinegar & honey
• Raw pack carrots with 1 clove garlic, 3 peppercorns and one sprig of fresh dill or 1/2 tsp dill seed per scalded pint jar.
• Pour hot liquid over carrots to 1/4" headspace, and use non-reactive utensil to remove air bubbles.
• Process for 15 minutes in boil water bath canner (or whatever is appropriate for your altitude).

And of course, if you're pickling, why not do pickled cucumbers?

Dill Slices

4 lbs medium cucumbers
1/3 cup honey
1/2 cup pickling salt
4 cups cider vinegar (see *Note below)
4 cups water
3 tbsp pickling spices in tea ball or spice bag
5 bay leaves
5 garlic cloves, peeled & thickly sliced
5 heads fresh dill or 5 tsp dried dill seed
2 1/2 tsp mustard seed

• Wash cucumbers, scrubbing lightly with soft vegetable brush to remove spines. Cut 1/8" off blossom end and discard. Cut into 1/4" slices or rounds
• Combine water, vinegar and salt, and place tea ball or spice bag of spices in, bring to a boil & simmer 15 minutes.
• Add honey, dissolve, and bring back to boil.
• Into each scalded pint jar, place 1 bay leaf, 1 garlic clove, 1/2 tsp mustard seed and 1 head of fresh dill or 1 tsp dill seed.
• Pack cucumber slices into hot jar with 3/4" headspace. Add hot pickling liquid and cover to within 1/2" headspace, and use non-reactive utensil to remove air bubbles.
• Process in boil water bath canner for 15 minutes (or whatever is appropriate for your altitude).

Note: When I do this recipe, I always get about 1 L of liquid left over from 6 pint jars. As a result, I've got pickling liquid left for another batch.

We have usually an over-abundance of lovely French filet green beans (we grow Maxibel), and while we freeze a lot, we thought it'd be nice to try some kind of pickle recipe. This one is a winner, and is fantastic with dumplings like pot-stickers.

Dilled Green Beans

4 lbs green beans, tipped & snapped into pieces (of course, if you want to have competition worthy beans, then Blue Lake is apparently king, and you want them cut exactly to fit your pint jars. Meh, I say; I just wanna eat them!)
4 cups cider vinegar
4 cups water
1/2 cup pickling salt
1/3 cup honey
3 tbsp pickling spices into tea ball or spice bag
7 cloves garlic, peeled and cut thickly
3 1/2 tsp mustard seeds
3 1/2 tsp hot pepper flakes
7 heads fresh dill heads or 7 tsp dried dill seeds

• Bring to boil vinegar, water, salt & spices; reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes.
• Add honey, dissolve, & bring back to boil.
• Into scalded pint jars, place one clove garlic, 1/2 tsp mustard seed, 1/2 tsp hot pepper flakes, 1 head fresh dill or 1 tsp dill seed.
• Pack bean pieces into hot jars.
• Ladle hot pickling liquid into jars, leaving 1/2" headspace, and use non-reactive utensil to remove air bubbles.
• Process in boiling water bath canner for 10 mintues (or whatever is appropriate for your altitude).

Cucumber Relish

We had an overabundance of cucumbers this year (they went a little nuts in our greenhouse), so aside from doing pickled cucumbers (we had a bit of a glut left over from last year as I couldn't bear eating them during pregnancy - I know, go figure!), I had to find something else to do with them. Along came this great cucumber relish recipe, which worked really well for us.

Cucumber Relish

6 lbs (about 10 cups chopped) cucumbers (we used a mix of Cool Breeze, Lemon and Suyo Long)
1 cup chopped white onion
4 cups chopped red bell peppers
3 cups chopped green bell peppers
1 cup chopped celery (about 4 ribs)
1/2 cup pickling or Kosher salt
3 1/2 cups pickling or cider vinegar
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
4 tbsp mustard seed
2 tbsp celery seed
1 tbsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground cloves
2 tsp ground allspice
2 tsp ground turmeric

Place all vegetables into an enamel lined or stainless steel pot and stir in salt. Cover & let stand 4 hours at room temperature.
Put vegetables into large colander and drain. Rinse with cold water, using hands to squeeze out excess liquids. Repeat rinse & squeeze.

Combine vinegar & spices & sugar and bring to boil. Cook for 10 minutes. Add drained vegetables and stir to blend. Bring back to full boil, reduce heat & simmer 10 minutes. Fill hot, scalded half-pint or pint jars to 1/2" headspace and process in boiling water bath for 10 minutes (up to 1000 feet altitude).

Nose to Tail... almost

This year we did a much better job of using the lovely venison that Dave got. We've become a little more adventurous, so we saved the heart, liver and tongue, along with the meat and bones this year. With our fabulous pressure canner, we can do meat preservation. Last year was the first year we tried chicken stock, and that was hugely successful. This year, we tried venison chili as well as stock, and they were brilliant.

One of Dave's favourite blogs is Hunter Gardener Angler Cook. Here's his venison stock recipe, which we basically followed (maybe a little less salt, as we didn't add salt to the final product), plus an onion (skin on) and a couple of parsnips, so the result was quite a bit sweeter, likely, than the original.

We made a couple of batches (so far!) of venison chili with our own tomatoes, and while I'd like to use our own kidney beans, the recipe calls for 3 cups worth, and we didn't have enough for two batches as well as saving seed stock for next year. I started with the USDA's Chili Con Carne recipe, then went from there. I can't use chili powder (don't know what's in it that bothers me, but it does), so I added a lot of my own spicing to it. Star anise is just magic with rich meat; I've started adding it to most of my venison recipes.

Venison Chili

• 3 cups dried pinto or red kidney beans
• 5-1/2 cups water
• 3 lbs ground venison
• 1-1/2 cups chopped onion
• 1 cup chopped red & green bell peppers
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 2 tsp cocoa powder
• 1 tsp toasted ground cumin seed
• 1/2 tsp ground coriander
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp ground cloves
• 1 tsp paprika
  
• 3 to 6 tbsp chili powder
• 1 1/2 qts tomatoes, peeled & puréed
  
• 2 jalapeño peppers, chopped
• 5 cloves garlic, chopped
  

Yield: 9 pints

Please read Using Pressure Canners before beginning. If this is your first time canning, it is recommended that you read Principles of Home Canning.

Procedure:Wash beans thoroughly and place them in a 2 qt saucepan. Add cold water to a level of 2 to 3 inches above the beans and soak 12 to 18 hours. Drain and discard water. Combine beans with 5-1/2 cups of fresh water, and 2 teaspoons salt. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat simmer 30 minutes. Drain and discard water. Brown ground beef, chopped onions, and peppers, if desired, in a skillet. Drain off fat and add 3 teaspoons salt, pepper, chili powder, tomatoes, and drained cooked beans. Simmer 5 minutes. Caution: Do not thicken. Fill jars, leaving 1-inch headspace. Adjust lids and process according to the recommendations below.

Recommended process time for Chile Con Carne in a weighted-gauge pressure canner.
			Canner Pressure (PSI) at Altitudes of
Style of Pack	Jar Size	Process Time	0 - 1,000 ft	Above 1,000 ft
Hot	Pints	75 min	10 lb	15 lb

Dave also got all the accouterments for sausage making this autumn, so we made some batches of venison sausage, too (with lots of meat in the freezer for making plenty more). We started off again at Hunter Gardener Angler Cook with this venison sausage recipe, tried it, then tweaked it for ourselves.

Venison Sausage

4 lb venison meat, ground
1 lb pork back fat, ground
1 tbsp Kosher salt
1 tbsp (heaping) dried juniper berries, chopped
2 tsp crushed dried sage (omit if canning the sausage meat, rather than casing & freezing)
1 tsp black pepper, ground
1/4 tsp (heaping) celery seed, ground
1/2 tsp cumin seed, toasted & ground
1 tsp coriander seed, crushed
1 tsp cinnamon, ground
2 star anise pods, ground
1/2 cup cold grape juice (the original called for gin; this is what we had on hand and it worked just fine)

Follow Hank's instructions for turning into sausages. It's usually suggested that you fry up some of the seasoned meat before you proceed much further, to make sure that you like the flavours you've added before you go to the bother of casing the sausages then find out you don't like it. Not a bad suggestion.

Finally, from one of my favourite cookbooks, Art of the Slow Cooker, comes a marvelous recipe for beef brisket that works just fine with venison cuts, especially big, juicy rump roasts.

Espresso Braised Venison

Rub:
2 tbsp finely ground espresso coffee beans
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp garlic powder (or 1-2 cloves garlic finely minced)
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp cumin seed, toasted & ground
1/2 tsp coarsely ground black pepper
1/4 tsp Kosher salt

Mix above ingredients in a small bowl & rub all over the meat. Wrap in plastic wrap and let rest at least 1 hour (we usually let it rest in the fridge overnight).

2 tbsp olive oil, divided
3 lbs venison
1 large onion, chopped
1 1/2 cups strong brewed coffee
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar (we used our own fruit vinegar here, yumm)
1/4 cup dark molasses
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 whole cloves

Heat 1 tbsp oil in large skillet over medium-high heat and brown the venison on both sides (about 5 minutes per side). Transfer to a 5 or 6 quart slow cooker.

Add remaining 1 tbsp oil to skillet, add onion & cook until browned (about 3 minutes). Add remaining ingredients except for the cloves and bring to a boil. Pour over venison in slow cooker and throw the cloves into the liquid. Cover the cooker and cook on high 4 to 6 hours or low 8 to 10 hours until meat is fork tender.

Remove cooked meat from cooker and let rest. Cut across the grain, and serve with the sauce.

Happy Pantry

One of my favourite chores at the end of the growing season, once the hectic pace of harvesting and preserving is over, is to take stock of what we've got on our pantry shelves and create a tally of our preserves for the year. This summer was quite the challenge, balancing looking after our new girl Kate with the work of the harvest. Dave, of course, did most of the work. I won't go into totals, but here are lists of what we put together last summer and this summer.

2009 Preserves Tally

• Spiced sweet cherries - great with pork
  
• Cherry pie filling
• Cherry conserve
  
• Cherry juice - this was fabulous
• Tomatillo salsa verde
• Tomato & pepper salsa
• Pickled carrots
• Pickled dilled cucumbers
• Dilled green beans
• Preserved baby figs
• Orchard fruit chili sauce
• Pears in juice
• Pear ginger conserve - another fabulous preserve
• Spiced pickled pears - weird but good with meat
• Blackberry juice
• Blackberry pear juice blend
• Apples in blackberry juice
• Lime & ginger tomatillo marmalade
• Apple pie filling
• Tomatillo/Green tomato mincemeat
• Grape juice
• Cranberry salsa - a fantastic condiment with poultry, especially on leftover sandwiches with mayo
• Cranberry juice
• Hot pepper jam - quite a bit like sweet Thai chili sauce, and an essential condiment with pot stickers
• Chicken stock
  
• Fruit vinegar - another essential condiment with pot stickers
  

2010 Preserves Tally
No cherries this year; really unfortunate year for cherries, sigh.

• Dilled green beans
• Pickled dilled cucumbers
• Apple blackberry juice
• Blackberry juice
• Raspberry juice - check out the Basil Sorbet using raspberry juice, yumm
• Cucumber relish - we used our overabundance of cucumbers and golden zucchinis, as well as our unripe Ruffle peppers for this fabulous relish. I highly recommend this recipe!
  
• Tomato & pepper salsa
• Tomatillo salsa
• Orchard fruit chili sauce
• Ginger pear conserve
• Tomatillo ginger & tangerine marmalade - even better than with lime!
• Green tomato mincemeat
  
• Hot pepper jam
• Honey plums
• Basil raspberry syrup - was supposed to be jelly, but didn't gel. Makes great syrup for pancakes!
• Chicken stock
  
• Venison stock
• Venison chili
• Fruit vinegar

It's sure nice having a happy pantry!

Heh, heh, heh.... Whooops!

I have been trying to clear out Mom's freezer to make some room for meat. She'd gone to all the work of peeling, coring and slicing apples into chunks, then freezing them. I thought it'd be nice to have them preserved in some of the juice that we'd been making.

Good idea. Bad execution.

Wanna know what happens in your pressure canner (yes, pressure canner, i.e. under pressure, not just as a boiling water bath canner) when you don't have enough headspace for your jars?


Yup. That was a mess. And it was fun to clean up.

FYI - for apples that have already been frozen, by the time you bring them up to temperature in the juice, they pretty much become applesauce consistency, no longer firm apple slices. Follow applesauce headspace directions (heck, maybe even give 'em a full inch, just to be sure), otherwise, this too could be what you experience when you open your pressure canner!

Baby Green Fig Preserve

A Fig Tree by Melita on Flickr

We had a wonderful harvest of our green figs this year; however, every year, we seem to have a second crop which absolutely never matures. It seems a shame to let them just drop off and rot, so I tried to find something to do with them. I'll tell you, it was a challenge. While I did find a couple of recipes (or thought I did), none of them provided me with actual, specific processing instructions, and that's a problem for figs (here are instructions for canning fresh, ripe figs - you'll notice how long the boiling water bath processing takes with them).

Figs are not a highly acidic fruit, so you either have to acidify what you're preparing them for, or you have to pressure can them (I got reference for the pressure processing from a couple of different sources, including Stocking Up, to use 5 lbs pressure for 10 minutes, but my pressure canning manual that came with my weighted-gauge pressure canner doesn't recommend anything done at less than 10 lbs pressure). That's fine, but I didn't really have a positive idea of how long & at what pressure to process in the pressure canner. And how much lemon juice or vinegar do you need to add to acidify them sufficiently to just use the boiling water bath method? And really, who wants to process for 45-50 minutes in the boiling water when a pressure canner cuts the time enormously?

Not really knowing what to do, I sort of combined knowledge from a few different locations. My base recipe was from a post by "denninmi" on a garden forum. But I added a signifcant amount of vinegar (roughly based on this pickled green tomatoes recipe) to hopefully increase the acidity sufficiently.

Sikalaki Gliko

2 pounds unripe figs
3 pounds sugar
2 cups cider vinegar
1 cup water
1 lemon, seeded & diced fine
1/2 tsp cloves
1 tsp cinnamon

Rinse the figs and poke a hole in blossom end of each fig with a thick nail, a screwdriver or just a paring knife. This step is very messy from the sticky latex oozing out of the figs. I also pruned off the stems, but other recipes suggest to leave the stems intact (I suspect this is for ripe figs only, but I'm not sure).
Place figs in water and let them soak for a few hours (I basically let them soak overnight). Discard the soaking water.
Boil the figs in plain water for 15 minutes.
Transfer figs into cold water, allow to cool down, then drain.
Replace cooking water with fresh water, and repeat the sequence of boiling the figs for 15 minutes, putting them in cold water until they’re cool, and then draining them.

I used a less than perfect aluminum pot (stainless steel is always recommend for preserving foods as it's non-reactive), because I didn't want to have an uncleanable, boiled-on latex mess on my wonderful stainless steel maslin pan. Yes, the boiled latex came off with a significant amount of elbow grease and a scrubby pad.

Boil the 3 pounds of sugar with the vinegar and water for about 5 minutes, then add the figs, diced lemon and spices.
Boil the figs in the syrup for 30 minutes, then turn the heat off.
Leave the figs in the syrup for 12 hours.
Remove the figs from the syrup and boil the syrup until "thick" - I boiled the syrup to soft-ball stage (230F). This took a good hour of stirring and waiting.
Put the figs back in and bring back up to a boil so that the figs are hot and the syrup is boiling. I did this part in my maslin pan, which was perfectly shaped for this step, and by this point the latex had been boiled out of the figs.


Transfer the figs to clean, scalded half pint (250 mL) jars. Squish the figs down so that the air is pushed out of the centres, and to pack the jar well. Don't pack the figs too tight; I did that and had to reprocess 5 of my 7 jars! And as a result of reprocessing, I had to make up a quick & dirty vinegar syrup to bring up the volume. Pour a little syrup to bring headspace up to 1/2" from rim. Run non-metal spatula around inside edge of jar to let air out, and adjust the headspace as necessary. Wipe rims with hot damp paper towel and apply two-piece metal snap & screw lids.

Now here's the tricky part. I couldn't find any concrete information about the processing time, so I placed the jars in my weighted gauge pressure canner and processed at 10 lbs pressure for 10 minutes (remember that you have to vent the canner according to the manufacturer's instructions before you place the weighted gauge on the vent, and timing for processing starts once the gauge starts to jiggle, indicating that the 10 lbs pressure has been reached).

I have to say that boiling the green figs is horribly stinky. I didn't enjoy that at all (about as pleasant-smelling, in my opinion, as boiling stinging nettle for nettle beer; in fact, I thought the boiling figs was far worse than the stinging nettles, and that's saying something). But once you get the figs into the syrup and start to flavour them with sweet & spice, it seems much less unpleasant. I tried one of the figs today and while it's not sweet, exactly (the syrup is), and it doesn't taste like a fresh ripe fig, you can certainly get an essence of fig-ness from the flavour, as well as green-ness. It'll be really interesting to try it with stinky cheese and crackers; that's what I'd originally wanted to do this for. So, fingers crossed it was worth doing!!

And fingers crossed that I don't kill us all with botulism from under-processing the figs. But with the vinegar, and the increase pressure, I think (hope!) I've over-compensated.

Cherries!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pirxthepilot/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Our friend has a large Bing cherry tree in her backyard, and a next-door neighbour of hers has a small, sour cherry variety. Dave the monkey climbed up into the farthest branches of each to pluck a significant harvest for us. As a result, I got busy preserving (of course)!

Cherry Pie Filling

Quality: Select fresh, very ripe, and firm cherries. Unsweetened frozen cherries may be used. If sugar has been added, rinse it off while the fruit is still frozen. I used a mixture of sweet and tart cherries to give the pie a more complex flavour.

Yield: 1 quart or 7 quarts

Procedure: See Table 1 for suggested quantities. Rinse and pit fresh cherries, and hold in cold water. To prevent stem end browning, use ascorbic acid solution.

For fresh fruit, place 6 cups at a time in 1 gallon boiling water. Boil each batch 1 minute after the water returns to a boil. Drain but keep heated fruit in a covered bowl or pot. Combine sugar (use less sugar if you're using more sweet cherries than sour, or if you're using all sweet cherries) and Clear Jel® in a large saucepan and add water. If desired, add cinnamon and cardamom. Stir mixture and cook over medium high heat until mixture thickens and begins to bubble. Add lemon juice and boil 1 minute, stirring constantly. Fold in drained cherries immediately and fill jars with mixture without delay, leaving 1 inch headspace. Adjust lids and process immediately according to the recommendations in Table 2.

Table 1. Cherry Pie Filling.
	Quantities of Ingredients Needed For
	1 Quart	7 Quarts
Fresh or thawed cherries	3-1/2 cups	8 - 9 quarts (original called for 6 quarts, but I found this insufficient)
Granulated sugar (see above)	1 cup	7 cups (I suggest 3 cups for tart filling)
Clear Jel®	1/4 cup + 1 tbsp	1 3/4 cup
Cold water	1 1/3 cup	9 1/3 cups
Bottled Lemon Juice	1 tbsp + 1 tsp	1/2 cup
Cinnamon	1/8 tsp	1 tsp
Cardamom	1/16 tsp	1/2 tsp

Table 2. Recommended process time for Cherry Pie Filling in boiling-water canner
		Process Time at Altitudes of
Style of Pack	Jar Size	0 - 1,000 ft	1,001 - 3,000 ft	3,001 - 6,000 ft	Above 6,000 ft
Hot	Pints or Quarts	30 min	35	40	45

Spiced Sweet Cherries

Original from Stocking Up

6 to 7 cups of sweet cherries (e.g. Bing)
Juice of 1 lemon
3 cups cider vinegar
1/2 cup honey
2 sticks cinnamon, each 2" long
24 whole cloves
1/8 tsp dried ginger or 2 slices fresh ginger cut 1/8" thick
2 bay leaves
3 segments of star anise
5 green peppercorns

Wash, pit & stem cherries and chill in ice water and juice from half a lemon.
In saucepan, bring to boil remaining lemon juice, vinegar, honey & spices then reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes.
Drain cherries. Fill 4 to 5 half pint (250 mL) clean, scalded jars 3/4 full with cherries. Strain hot pickling liquid over cherries, leaving 1/2-inch headspace. Remove air bubbles and adjust headspace if needed. Wipe rims of jars with a dampened, clean paper towel; apply two-piece metal canning lids. Process in a boiling water canner according to the recommendations below.

Recommended process time for Spiced Sweet Cherries in a boiling water canner.
		Process Time at Altitudes of
Style of Pack	Jar Size	0 - 1,000 ft	1,001 - 6,000 ft	Above 6,000 ft
Hot	Half-pints or Pints	10 min	15	20

Black Cherry Conserve

Original from Stocking Up

2 seeded oranges, chopped fine, and if sweet, add:
(1 peeled & seeded lime, chopped fine)
1 quart black, sweet cherries, stemmed, pitted & washed
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup lemon juice
3/4 tsp cinnamon
6 cloves or 1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp cardamom

Barely cover the citrus with water (or cherry juice*) and cook until very tender.
Add cherries, lemon juice, honey & spices, bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until thick and clear.
Ladle into hot, scalded half-pint (250 mL) jars, leaving 1/4-inch headspace. Remove air bubbles and adjust headspace if needed. Wipe rims of jars with a dampened, clean paper towel; apply two-piece metal canning lids. Process in a boiling water canner according to the recommendations below.

Recommended process time for Black Cherry Conserve in a boiling water canner.
		Process Time at Altitudes of
Style of Pack	Jar Size	0 - 1,000 ft	1,001 - 6,000 ft	Above 6,000 ft
Hot	Half-pints or Pints	10 min	15	20

*We made cherry juice by steaming a mix of sweet & tart cherries in a very shallow amount of water (to prevent scorching). After canning (leave 1/4" headspace and process according to instructions for Grape Juice), I had some juice left over and it was perfect for the preserves.