Change of Plans – From Canning to Freezing

First issue, is this is over a week of my tomato harvest. If I wait any longer to do anything with them, I will lose them. It’s just not worth canning up 1 or 2 jars at a time. Second, I have a few dietary restrictions that make things challenging.

Somewhere around my late 40s I just stopped being able to digest garlic and onions. Like full stop, does not work. I did not know what this was until a gal that was on the FODMAP diet talked about it with me. I am not a speciality diet kind of guy so I had always assumed this was another weird fad.

Turns out, it is not. I have an issue with garlic and it has a vendetta against me that is biblical in proportions. Onions, are a close second. I just can’t eat them anymore which sucks because my favorite soup is French onion soup, and I don’t think I cooked with out garlic and onions since I was 16 years old.

Turns out the FODMAP thing has some elements that work for me, so while I do eat out and end up with garlic in my food I use Fodmate and that keeps it to a low rumble, literally. I don’t want to make my own food with garlic or onions at all though.

This is one of the reasons I really prefer to cook at home. It’s just easier to keep garlic and onions out of everything that way.

This complicates things for me when I do canning with approved recipes. A lot of the tomato based recipes are like 50% onions. It’s easy to omit the garlic, but not so much the onions. I am so new to canning I just don’t feel safe water bath canning anything not in my books, either. I just don’t want to adjust recipes.

My garden has a lot of tomatoes, but when I looked up the Ball book recipe it would take 2 and 2/3 pounds of tomatoes for each 16 oz canning jar for the crushed tomato recipe. That’s the only one that doesn’t have an overwhelming mass of onions. Canning for 1 or 2 jars just doesn’t seem worth it.

So this morning I switched gears, and looked up freezing. I have a chest freezer, and turns out you can freeze your canning jars. Everything I have searched for says they will retain flavor for 12 months, but some folks say they have used them from the freezer up to 3 years later.

All this means, is when I finally get an electrician to run power to the shed, I will be buying a much larger freezer for in there.

This took me like 20 minutes total to do. I cored them, boiled them for 1 minute, then tossed them in ice water, and peeled them and put them in my 16oz canning jars.

I was a little worried about headroom. It said to give an inch so I was hoping I left enough? I crammed them all in, and it looked good. I checked this morning, and it froze beautifully. Like now when my wife makes Indian and needs a can of tomatoes, we have them. I think we use them in curries most of all, so this is exciting. I am ecstatic to have my own food that I grew ready to use.