Well, what does one do with all of these? We eat a lot of them and we have been generously giving them away. And, today we ventured into canning for the first time on our own. Last year we co-purchased a steam canner with friends. We used it early in the summer to make the blueberry jam. This morning we tackled these two boxes of tomatoes (plus about half a box more than this). When we ran out of time, we still had a half a box left, and we have not harvested for two days!
Here's the equipment ready to go. Lot's of things involving hot or boiling water: big pot of boiling water to blanch the tomatoes in to loosen the skins, bowl of ice water to dunk them in after that, small pot to keep the lids hot, large pot for cooking tomatoes (for crushed tomatoes) and the canner. Plus two cutting boards and lots of containers for compost and as much left-over juice as we could capture (tomato juice!).
Penny is removing one of the tomatoes from the boiling water, getting ready to skin it. (The kitchen is heating up; outdoor temperature in the 90's.)
Two hours of work - six quarts of tomatoes to store - three crushed, three whole raw-packed. A pretty good accomplishment actually! I think on some raw winter day we will really appreciate ourselves for having done this.One thing we have learned is that if we want to preserve more tomatoes in various ways, it would be good to grow plum tomatoes. We always grow heirlooms because they are so good for slicing and eating - and so pretty - but they are very watery and so the canned products are pretty watery, too. Of course, when we use them later, we can cook them down more. But next year we will experiment with a crop of paste tomatoes.
Now, off to harvest more tomatoes!
