Sauced

For my first try at gardening, I've had a pretty good year. Our tomato plant in particular was especially spectacular. And fruitful. For awhile there I was harvesting 5-8 tomatoes a day. With the cold snap, it's down to 8 or so a week, but we still have quite a few tomatoes to contend with.

My family "doesn't like tomatoes" - or so they say. They don't like plain tomatoes. But they like pizza, spaghetti, chili and all sorts of tomatoey foods. So I decided to make tomato sauce with my tomatoes. I found a recipe for lazy, I mean efficient, folks who don't want to peel & seed tomatoes all day. You can find it here. And then you can be efficient like me & Laura.
All I did was cut out the core of the tomato, quarter it, and throw it in the blender. Hit puree and you're good to go. It took all of 10 minutes to get all those tomatoes in the pot. I did add some onion, garlic, peppers, carrots, and basil for flavor and added nutrition, so that took a bit more time. The results were worth it though.

After 2 hours of bubbling away on the stove, the sauce was all ready to go in the canner. I got 5 pints and 1 half-pint out of my tray of tomatoes.

I have repeated this process twice now. My friend Lori gave me a 1/4 bushel of tomatoes from her garden that I used also. I've canned a total of 3 quarts, 9 pints, and 5 half-pints of tomato sauce. It's rich and thick and will taste wonderful in the middle of the winter.