Tomatoes

What better way to spend a rainy weekend (like ours was last weekend) than to can tomatoes!?  We bought about seventy pounds of the suckers at Thistledown Farm just north of Eugene for 49 cents a pound, and canned away!  Actually, what started this whole shindig is while we were down in Medford, Nancy let us pick a bunch of peppers from her garden, so we wanted to make salsa, but since none of our tomatoes are ripe, we had to buy some.  And to get the cheap price on tomatoes, we had to buy the whole box.  So, we decided just to can some regular tomatoes, too.  And then we decided to go back and buy another box of tomatoes, and can them, too.  And now I'm thinking I may want another box or so. . . but that means we would have to buy more jars.  Hmm. . . I'm thinking about it.

Salsa ingredients

We canned seven pints of salsa, fourteen pints of diced tomatoes (one didn't seal), six pints of tomato sauce, and seven quarts of whole tomatoes.  Now we'll really see how many tomatoes we eat in a year.  I bet it will be more than we canned.

From left to right: diced, whole, salsa, sauce.

We also dried some tomato slices in the dehydrator.  We're not sure what to use them for, but I'm sure we will figure something out.

Dried tomato slices in a jar to be put in the freezer.

I don't think you have to freeze them after they're dry, but we did, just in case there's any moisture left, we don't want them to mold.

Cannded goods storage in our garage.
Also includes twelve quarts of peaches we did earlier,
and empty jars waiting for applesauce!

We also made tomato soup and spaghetti sauce with the tomatoes, so we figure we only canned about sixty pounds of the seventy we bought.  Anyway, the recipes were really good, so I'll probably post them soon.  If I can remember where we got them from. . .

Tomato soup with Asiago cheese, yum!

Well, that was last weekends adventure, once Clint gets his homework done, we can move on to this weekends adventure:  Applesauce, round one!