For some reason the olive oil makes me nervous.

Smart. It should make you nervous since extensive testing by NCHFP has proven it to be quite unsafe. :) With the exception of a couple of tested recipes no oils are allowed in home canned foods because the oil insulates all the bacteria and prevents the heat from killing it.

You can learn a great deal more about safe food preservation over on the Harvest forum here. It is the canning and food preserving forum. Linked it for you below.

Take great care with the food preservation info you find on the web. Some of it is just dangerous and some of it is down right lethal. When in doubt you can always go to NCHFP as they are the recognized authorities on it.

Dave

Here is a link that might be useful: Harvest Forum

Thanks Dave,

I knew it didn't sound right. I will check out the harvest forum.

I tried canning cherries the conventional way, and by the time they were finished, they ended up as not much more than mushy skins.
Now, back to canning with water, vinegar and oil. It may not be considered safe, but when I was in college, in the hills of West Virginia, there was an 'ol timer that "canned" bananna peppers and a few pieces of garlic in oil, water and vinegar. No cooking at all! I ate plenty of them over the years. It was delicious. Dangerous... I don't know, but I never got sick. Probably the vineagar lowered the Ph enough that it killed most of the bad stuff.

Thanks for the reply. I think the 'ol timer probably knew what he was doing, sadly I don't ;) I'll stick to vinegar and water for my tomatoes. As far as canning the cherries, I'm leaning toward throwing them all in the blender and making a sauce out of them. I just have so many I was trying to think of some way of preserving them whole without having them fall apart.

Last year, I made spicy dilly green tomato pickles for the first time from end-of-the-season cherries. A good friend of mine in his 50s said they are the best pickles he's ever tasted. It took me a while to acquire the taste, but now I'm considering picking the cherry tomatoes early in their unripe stage if the other varieties are productive enough for my other needs.

The NCHFP site has a recipe that uses sweet peppers, but I understand that you can safely trade sweet peppers for hot peppers as much as you want as long as the total amount of pepper doesn't exceed the amount of pepper called for in the recipe.