How Now Chow-Chow

Saturday afternoon I got in a mood....a canning mood. Actually, it was a "we gotta do something with some of this produce or it'll go bad" mood, which quickly turned into a canning mood. For several years, I made homemade chow-chow relish mostly to put in baked beans during summer BBQs. I haven't made any in a couple of years and have just made due w/ tomatilla salsa that Michael's brought home from work. Well, the leftover cabbage and cauliflower in the fridge got my mind to running. Turns out we had almost everything we needed, even part of a red pepper and some green tomatoes (from our garden!). What we didn't have was green bell peppers, so I added in what any self-respectin' Texan would add....jalapeno peppers! :-)

Dump it all in a bowl, add salt, wait 4-6 hours,

Mix up all these other ingredients....

Rinse and drain the salt off the veggies....

Boil the spices....

Add the veggies to the spice mixture and simmer for 20 min...

Put the relish into hot jars... or better yet, have your wonderful hubby do it!!

You have to process the jars in a boiling water canner for 10 minutes. Since it takes so long for so much water to get boiling hot, I decided to use as many spaces in the canner as possible and at the last minute thought to can some cherries that I had. Josiah and Jeffrey had fun pitting the cherries...thanks to the world's greatest cherry pitter from Williams Sonoma! Again, my wonderful hubby helped out and made the syrup for the cherries.

We put the syrup in and added the cherries.

Everything was clickin' along just fine until I made a huge rookie mistake. The two jars of cherries had cooled off too much by the time the water was boiling in the canner. Guess what happens when you add a jar that's not hot to hot water????? The glass breaks! In this case, the bottom broke off in a nice little circle (no jagged edges or anything) and cherries started floating around in the water....

So, we quickly heated up the other jar of cherries and put them in with the chow-chow. I was frustrated b/c it was the BIG jar of cherries that broke, but Michael fished them out and fed them to the chickens. Ahhh, the joys of farm life! The chickens really liked the sweetened cherries!:-) Happy chickens lay nice eggs!

So, now we have 3 jars of chow chow and 1 small jar of cherries ready for summer!

Coming soon(or should I say "canning soon")....pickles and green beans...well, not together...in separate jars! And since they're on sale this week for $2.99/lb @HEB, probably more cherries.