tomato or tomahto? either way, it's sauce time.

We decided to don our crazy hats and make a double batch of pizza sauce and a full batch of tomato sauce. The salsa took up the morning, but these sauces took up the majority of the rest of the day between the cook time and processing time, plus the two hours (yes, TWO hours) I spent processing tomatoes through the food mill. Good thing we're dedicated for a lot of reasons to this canning thing. This tomato day was almost enough for us to just throw up our sticky red hands and be done with it. I'm sure we'll be happy though to grab a jar of pizza sauce for homemade pizza nights this winter. It's my goal to preserve as many tomato things as possible so as to lessen the blow when the good fresh tomatoes are no longer available in the store.

Tomatoes like this:

Out comes the trusty dutch oven, ready to sit on the stove for hours.

After it cooks, it goes down through the food mill to remove the seeds and skins.

Ah, clean jars. I will never get sick of taking photos of ball jars. 

Warm up the sauce, and get it into hot jars with some bottled lemon juice.

After the spaghetti sauce was underway, we cut tomatoes for pizza sauce. The Ball Blue Book recipe wanted you to quarter tomatoes and run them raw through the food mill. Which I did. And it took me forever. Until Mark got home from picking up our quarter of a cow from Weatherbury Farms (yes, that's right) and helped me use a bigger food mill blade and then he did three times more in 15 minutes than I managed to do in almost 2 hours.

Real kitchen photo time. This is only a fraction of the mess in the kitchen on tomato day. I didn't take photos of the floor or the legs of the island. Too embarrassing.

You end up with a lot of tomato puree to cook down.

Process process and process some more. We ended up with about 20 or so jars? Maybe 25? I've blocked it out already. 

Final tomato post to come and the big reveal of the new shelves.