Tomatoes

This year I took the big plunge and ordered an extra box of canning tomatoes from our CSA.  (Yes, that is right, canning, not canned.)  Thanks to Sarah, I knew that I might be in for a bit of work when they arrived.  I did not, however, expect to get the tomatoes the afternoon before we left town for the weekend.  I made the best of a tough situation and sweated things out in the kitchen for about 5 hours.  The work was well worth it.

I used two different recipes.  One for a basic, roasted tomato sauce.  So very easy!  And Amanda's sauce recipe.  The roasted tomato sauce had a concentrated, pure tomato flavor, great for adding to in the future.  I must have made a mistake somewhere in trying to double (or was it triple) Amanda's recipe and the sauce ended up needing to cook down forever.  That resulted in a very strongly seasoned batch of sauce.  I ended up blending some of both together and achieved a great consistency and flavor for pasta/ pizza sauce.

In the end, I stocked my freezer with 8 pint jars of the pasta sauce, 1 pint and 2 quart jars of the roasted tomato sauce, 1 pint of eggplant caponata sauce (leftovers from dinner that night), and 2 gallon ziplocks of washed, whole tomatoes for soups this winter.  I used these bpa free plastic pint jars from Ball that I found at my local large grocery store (for less than this online price) because I was afraid of glass in the freezer.  I did end up using a couple of wide mouth glass quart jars that I had because I didn't have enough plastic.  I just left a lot of headroom in the glass ones.  It was well worth the time and money spent.  Next year, I'll hopefully have things timed out better and I'll get the tomato soup made and frozen in advance too.  I guess it's not too late.  I'm thinking I might have to take another note from Amanda and try out her carrot tomato soup.  I'll let you know how it goes!