Canning Day

This Labor Day weekend found Melissa and I, canning our bounty of garden tomatoes. Well, the first round anyway. The process is pretty straight forward. Scald the tomatoes first in boiling water. Then blanch them in cold water and remove the skins. The next step in our case was to half or quarter them and the place them into sterilized jars. We added lemon juice and salt to the tomatoes to help with the  preservation process. Once the jars were filled we put on the lids and boiled the for about 45 minutes in our large stock pot. We will be repeating the process again this week as the second round of tomatoes ripen.