Frustrating!!!

Frustration was the name of the day yesterday.

I didn't go to bed until 3 am Sunday morning running the jars of meat sauce through the pressure canner.  I ended up just letting them sit on the towel on the kitchen table all night and when I woke up 5 hours later to go to church, they were still hot so I didn't check the seals.  We spent the whole day at my parents house celebrating Christmas (finally) and when I got home, the jars were cooled, but only six of the eleven quarts of sauce sealed.  URGH!!!!

I was going to do the good homesteader thing and try to reprocess them, but after I dumped all the sauce from the unsealed jars into the pot to reheat, my husband and I got into a disagreement and he wanted to talk it through (which was the right thing to do, but it doesn't get canning jars filled and processed!!).  So, the sauce boiled on the stove for an hour or so and all I got to do was turn it off and let it cool overnight, since I wasn't going to stay up all night a second night in a row processing jars (I've had a sore throat and cough now for three weeks, I need my sleep).  It's too late to try and re-can it, so I'm just going to put it into freezer bags and freeze it.  I feel so defeated, because the main reason I was trying to can that stuff was to free up some room in the freezer by getting the ground deer out of there.  Grrrr.

On the upside, I do have six jars of sauce in the basement.  I have so much fun walking them down to the shelf and lining them up nice and neat, all in rows.  A shelf of full canning jars is so pretty.  I think the prettiest ones are the jams and stocks.  

Still no work done on the marmalade.  The oranges are starting to look pretty puny.  If it doesn't happen today, I'll have to find something else to do with them.  I also just ate my last peach fruit roll up I had made from the bumper crop of peaches that my IL's got this year.  The kids love them, so maybe I should make more room in the freezer by using up frozen berries to make fruit roll ups.