Last month I was telling A.P. that we wouldn’t be able to do something he wanted to do. My astute little negotiator replied with, “Mom! Come on. What does our main man Barack Obama say?”

Ummm… Pakistan.  Iraq.  Haiti.  Oil Spill.  Watch your mouth, Biden?  Will someone remind me why I wanted to be President again?

“I don’t know, what does he say?”

“Yes! We! CAN!” Complete with fist pump.

He didn’t get what we wanted, but I got a title for this blog post.

I canned tomatoes yesterday.  Let me show you the money (and then I’ll stop with the cliches):

• A quart of tomatoes equals 2.2 cans (14.5 ounce).
• I canned 14 quarts of tomatoes, which equals 30.8 cans.
• I paid $13.00 for my tomatoes, so that is the equivalent of $0.42 a can.

This is a good price on canned tomatoes, for sure. Factor in that the flavor is superior to even those fancy, premium brands and the deal just got better. If BPA concerns you (and it probably should) there is a tiny amount of BPA in the lids used for canning, although I have heard there are BPA-free lids now. The tomatoes don’t touch the tops of the lids for any significant time because you leave about an inch of ‘headspace’ when you can. Compare this to the BPA lined cans that store bought tomatoes hang out in for months.

 You can’t even buy BPA free canned tomatoes, regardless of how much you pay.

I am mentioning tomatoes specifically because our family goes through more tomatoes than any other canned item. I’m all about bang for my buck. It’s not worth it to me to spend a day canning beets even if I got the best deal ever because we wouldn’t eat them. No money saved, no BPA exposure reduced. Just a lot of beets on the shelf.

If you haven’t canned before, start with tomatoes. They are the easiest thing to can, and have a way higher yield than stupid peaches.  That means that unlike stupid peaches, which by the time you get rid of the skins and hack it apart to get the pits out and have approximately 1000 raw peaches per quart, tomatoes are pretty much What You See Is What You Get.

As an added bonus, you can often get them for free from overwhelmed friends whose tomato plants are ripe and demanding to be picked. Once you purchase the initial equipment, you can use it year after year with the exception of new lids (they’re cheap). 

So how do you do it? I have some resources for you (of course!). 

1. Read my initial post about canning, just a year after I started.  We were so young then.
2. Listen to my Dad about using old, cracked jars.
3. Check out Eat Local, West Michigan! for more resources (even if you don’t live in here).

Let me know how it turns out! Yes! We! CAN!