The end of summer: Canning Tomatoes :)

So life goes on... Just this past Sunday we had friends over for dinner, first time since we moved to our new home :) We cleaned, polished, shopped... did you know you can fix heat marks on a table with a steaming iron? And Ming made his beloved Jamaican Jerk Chicken and ribs. The evening flew by, we shared summer stories, unusual encounters, and washed our tasty dinner down with plenty of beer and wine. Of course, the evening cannot be complete without me passing out on the couch after our guests left. A great dinner party always brings me back other fond memories of eating with friends, I'm grateful for every one of these memories, and I wish we have many many more in the future.

A couple years ago when I decided to eat local and seasonal, one obvious ingredient I had to give up was tomatoes in the winter. That is a bummer because tomatoes are absolutely one of my favorite flavors; especially when I'm trying to be a vegetarian cook, tomato dishes became one of my biggest go-tos. I find them oddly flavorful and satisfying even without meat in them. Thus, the idea of canning tomato sauce came to my radar. I mean, it sounds so fun it's worth a try :)

My work station

Got them last week at the farmer's market with a discount (I love deals)  The farmer told me the long skinny ones are ideal for making sauce, because they're less watery and can act as a thickener 

Before skinning all the tomatoes, I saved seeds from a couple of them. All you need to do is cut them open, scoop the seeds out and put them in water for 3 days. The fermentation saves the seeds from deceases. Then you can just wash them, dry them, and store them. The tomatoes I have in my planters are seeds I saved last year from our landlord's garden, just saying, it works :)

 The first step in making sauce is skinning the tomatoes, plop them in boiling water for 30 seconds and dunk them in cold water. The tomato skins will come right off! Ming looked at me doing it for a while and asked, "Can I try?"

 Once all the tomatoes are 'naked,' then it's time to take the seeds and pulp away. The main goal of all this is to squeeze as much water out from the fruit as possible.

Quite the bloody mess I'll say

 Don't throw the tomato water away! It taste just as sweet, citricy, and intense as any good tomato tastes like. It's intant tomato stock, I boiled it a with bunch of soup vegetables and threw in some pasta, and a refreshing lunch is served!

Once the tomatoes are prepared everything else was a breeze. boil the tomatoes down in sauteed onions, garlic, basil; season the sauce with some salt and pepper, red wine? Put them in sanitized jars, oops, forgot to mention, I washed the jars in the dishwasher while I was doing the previous steps. Lastly put the sealed jars in a boiling water bath for 35 minutes.

Yay! After all that work, all I got was 6.5 jars?!

If anyone is interested in making and canning their own sauce, please don't use what I wrote as reference. We'll know in a couple weeks time if this project was successful or not. You'll find this website is much more helpful and informative: http://www.pickyourown.org/spaghettisauce.htm