The canning/freezing season is now upon us.  Every summer is my busy season when it comes to fresh produce.  I do a lot of freezing to be able to make healthy smoothies for S all year long.  In each smoothie he gets 8 servings of his fruits/vegetables and 1 dairy serving.  There are always 4 veggies, 4 fruit, and 1 yogurt.

When S was a baby I started by making all of his baby food from produce we grew in our garden or what I was able to get at our local farmer’s market.  As a baby he ate all kinds of fruits and veggies you can’t find in stores.  For example fruits and veggies not normally found in stores he ate would be: cauliflower, red beets, zucchini, summer squash, pumpkins, raspberries, strawberries, cantaloupe, and watermelon.  Of course, I made the regular fruits and veggies: broccoli, peas, green beans, carrots, plums, bananas, peaches, pears, applesauce, and I am sure there is more I forgot.

Done on July 25, 2013

This week I was happy to see there were apricots at the farmer’s market.  They were really big this year compared to previous years.  It was $4.00 for a pint of apricots (5-6).  I got $20 worth of apricots.  I told them to give me any seconds they may have because I was going to cook them down so I didn’t really care what they looked like on the outside.  They gave me 38 apricots.  B really liked them and told me to save some.  I washed, cut, and cooked 30 apricots.

• I washed all of the apricots with soap to get off any potential pesticides that may have been on the outside.  Once they were rinsed and dried I began cutting them up.

Washed apricots

• Last year I did not take the skins off of the apricots and just cooked them down with skins on.  They basically breakdown to nothing.
• I cut the apricots in half and took the pit out, and then just cut them in slices and put them in a large pot with a steamer on the bottom and 1-inch of water.

Pitted, and sliced ready for steaming

• The apricots cooked for just over an hour in the pot with a lid on it.  I had to really watch them so that the juices did not overflow.  They did overflow but only twice.
• I used a slotted spoon to scoop out the apricots and the spoon helped drain some of the liquid.  There was so much liquid in the pot that it was over half full with juice.  I cannot believe how much liquid came from those apricots.

Steamed and broken down, you can see how much liquid was in the pot

• I blended the apricots down to a nice puree.

Blended to a puree

• The apricots I put through a sieve to prevent any chunks or skin to get through to the puree.

Pouring through the sieve

Smooth puree

• Once that was done I poured them into ice cube trays.  I filled up 4 ice cube trays with 16 cubes in each tray for a total of 64 cubes or ounces.  Each cube is 1 oz.

Pouring into ice cubes

This is a thick juice so it works well for baby food, but thin enough it works out great for smoothies.

The rest of the summer I will continue to post about all of our canning and freezing.   I will also post pictures of our garden(s) under Crafts and how they grow throughout the season and how much produce B gets from the gardens.  If history repeats itself we will have 8 foot tomato plants and so much extra produce that our neighbors get burnt out on all the fruits and veggies as much as we do.