Sometimes I'm a Nervous Nelly...

For those of you who know me well, this is no big surprise: I'm sometimes a Nervous Nelly.

 I'm mostly confident in myself and most of my abilities. But some things throw me for a loop, and I get all nervous.

Maybe it's because I'm afraid of failure? Not sure why; I've failed at stuff before and I've totally survived each failure. It's just an icky feeling and I hate it.

But I digress.

Here's the story:

My mom had an over-abundance of tomatoes in her garden this year, and she ended up making a rather tasty homemade sweet and sour sauce, and then bottled it. Two batches.

When I went to visit my family in Utah the first weekend of the month, Mom still had an over-abundance of tomatoes, and Momma gave me lots of them so I could make (and bottle) my own sweet and sour sauce. (Yay! Hooray!)

Last Friday, I holed up at home and hunkered down the kitchen (after running a million errands that morning), and I got to work!

Now, dear readers, I don't want you to think that COOKING turns me into a Nervous Nelly. I rather enjoy cooking. The part that made me  most nervous about this whole...process (and it was quite the process) was the canning/bottling part.

I'm pretty sure I remember "helping" my mom can food in the days of my youth, but I feel pretty confident that Ma did the bottling portion. Oh, come on, self, let's just be honest: Mom did most of the work. I was mostly there to keep her company, occasionally squishing the fruit for jams, or helping to wash various fruits or vegetables, or to (maybe) get in the way.

The fact is, I'm a 30 year old Mormon woman who has never really bottled anything.

This is a perfect example of one thing that turns me into a Nervous Nelly: doing something all by myself without someone around to look over my shoulder and guide me through the process. (It's a wonder I survived--and graduated--my Master's program at USU, huh?)

What if, after the long process of peeling tomatoes, cutting vegetables, doing everything my recipe told me to do...what if I ruined the bottling procedure, and I was left with 14 bottles of (hopefully delicious) sweet and sour sauce that ought to be eaten within the next week or so before it went bad? OR! (My brain rarely shuts off with just one "what if," so you know.) Or what if I actually followed the recipe wrong and my sweet and sour sauce wasn't actually as delicious as I knew my mother's was? OR! What if (even worse!), I made a nasty sauce AND the bottling process went awry?! Surely, my inner demon would mark me as a rotten homemaker altogether and I'd die inside just a little bit.

Y'all are probably glad you weren't in the kitchen with me last Friday.

I got busy boiling water to pour over my sinkful of tomatoes, peeling my sinkful to tomatoes, realizing I had too many tomatoes to do just half a batch and running to the store to buy more bottles, chopping up onions and bell peppers...it was a long process, but one I enjoyed up until I had added my final ingredients and the sauce was thickening on the stove top.

peeling tomatoes, even after trying to boil their skins off, isn't exactly "fun"

these bad boys were POTENT...
maybe i should invest in goggles?

nom, nom, nom!

i think this was after i added the "sour" portion
(meaning soy sauce and vinegar)

the "sweet" part:
pineapple juice and sugar!

LOTS of questions came to my mind. Questions like:

*Do I need to wash my brand new bottles before I fill them with sauce?
*When do I start timing the 35 minute hot-bath?
*How long do I put the lids in hot water before I put them on top of my bottles?
*Only 7 bottles fit in my hot-bath pot at once; what the what do I do with the other seven bottles just waiting to be filled? Do I fill them all at once? Do I top them all with warm lids and rings and hope for the best? The bottles need to be completely submerged for their hot bath, right?
*Plus some other questions.

as it turns out, you should clean out your new bottles before using them
(thanks for the advice, Ma!)

Naturally, I called my mom. She's a stellar homemaker, and she's got this "bottling" thing in the bag. *Sooooo grateful my mom has a cell phone! And sooooo grateful that I didn't actually start making the sauce until late enough in the day that my mom was available to take my calls.

Because, of course these questions only occurred to me one at a time.

My poor, dear, sweet mother. I called her, I think, four times. Maybe five...

35 minute hot bath

Anyway. As nervous as I was (and I was nervous!), it was actually kind of fun. And now I kind of understand the bottling process. I feel quite confident that I will bottle stuff again in the future.

the final product: all 14 of them sealed!!!

I also feel quite confident that I'll be calling my mom the next time I bottle...anything.

And now...the recipe:

SWEEET & SOUR SAUCE

Anita Thurston

10-12 cups peeled and chopped tomato

4 cups chopped onion

4 cups chopped bell pepper

---cook down until tender (about 15 minutes)---

5 cups sugar

8 tablespoons soy sauce

3 cups white vinegar

---stir and cook---

In a blender:

drain two 20 oz pineapple tidbits

blend to juice:

juice of pineapple

1/2 cup water

1 cup sugar

1 cup "ultraset" or "clear jel A"

---Add to hot mixture and cook until hot and thickened---

Add the pineapple tidbits

Stir and pour into pint jars

Hot-bath for 35 minutes

1 batch makes 14 pints

Enjoy! 

And don't let it turn you into a Nervous Nelly!!!