Canning Tomatoes -- 50 Pounds

Today we took on 50 pounds (of tomatoes). Had no idea that it would be as involved, even though we had a precursor to canning with our small batch of 10 pounds.

We didnt make any jam this time -- its almost too cold for the berries to still be on the trees (said by the Southerner). With that said, there is condensation on all of the kitchen windows because of how much warmer it is inside vs. outside. Maureen walked with the wagon that holds 800lbs up to the farmer's market, we fetched the 50 pounds of 'maters and headed back home. We prepped everything - which actually takes time but is not the longest part of our Saturday endeavour. Prepping included getting all of the jars in the dishwasher, scoring the bottoms of all 50 pounds of tomatoes, boiling water to blanch them and the ice water bath.... and everything that goes along with those tasks: emptying the dishwasher, cleaning the sink, making ice, and cleaning up to just make a huge mess (there is tomato literally covering all parts of the kitchen).

Once the tomatoes are blanched, you give them a quick dip and take off the skin. That only took 2 hours or something close to that. We decided that it was lunch time so we took a break so go back to squeezing the juice and seeds out of al 50 pounds. This took the longest time -- and was the most tedious. We came to the conclusion that back in the day, yes, back in the day, our grandmothers fingers must have been much stronger and conditioned for this type of back-breaking finger-hurting work. Seriously, repetitive motion injuries are coming our way, but well worth every minute of it. Sadie had to put on dish gloves because she's a wimp and the acid in the tomatoes was making her finger tips hurt

After all of the tomatoes were squished, they have to cook. We filled 2 complete pots and had the water bath heating up on the other 2 burners. With the stove completely full, we realized we needed another burner to boil the lids and rings. Improvise was the word of the day so we made a batch of tomatoes one at a time so "cook" or uh, sterilize the lids.

Filled up the jars, improvised on the amount of salt, and water bathed our quarts of tomatoes. We ended up with 13 quarts of fresh crushed tomatoes.

Then it was on to re-purposing the tomato juice we spent 3 hours squishing out of the tomatoes. Yes, we are exaggerating the time but it definitely felt that way, especially to our fingers and joints.

We had a recipe but because we were improvising, we added a little of this and a little of that to the recipe: carrots, onions, garlic (extra of course), horseradish (extra extra extra), beets, parsley, basil, thyme, tomato parts, peppers, pepper, a little salt and lemon juice. We (thankfully) remember that you cant add a lot of hot liquid to a food processor so it took a while to blend all of our juice to incorporate all of our ingredients, but Maureen has the patience of Job so we successfully accomplished that task (and Sadie wore her dish gloves and washed the dishes).

After canning the juice, we figured we had been at it for 5+ hours and it was time to call it a day.

Stay tuned...