This weekend Katie helped me can our tomatoes. I don't have an exact quantity but I think there were around three bushels of them. It was our biggest canning marathon to date. Katie purchased a giant pot (this picture does it no justice- it is equivalent to one and a half five gallon pales) for us to use and before cooking it down we had 27 quarts of tomatoes simmering away. In the end we produced 13 quarts of sauce. It was defiantly a weekend affair and all the best moments were never captured with my camera... the eight hours we were able to talk without interruption, the tomato waterfalls as they began to thaw, the smell of the simmering sauce, the tea drinking, the head scratching that finally ended in seat-belting the giant pot into my van and transporting it to my parents (where we finished simmering and canning it the next day). My mom helped too by watching the girls on Saturday (the boys were up north hunting) and then letting us take over her kitchen on Sunday to finish the job (and feeding us all with delicious chili). Oh and Grace and Nora helped out to by entertaining us with a great dancing and singing show. It was a lot of work but so fulfilling, and definitely made all the better by being surrounded with family. A few notes for next year...
~ Use only the best paste tomatoes, no more freezing little ones or the more watery varieties
~ Have lots of towels handy, thawing tomatoes causes massive flooding
~ The chopping alone took 3 hours
~ This part was only fun because we did it together, in other words, do not attempt alone!
~ This whole process took around 15 hours
~ It was really hard to seed them when they were frozen, I need to look more into this and see if I can't find a better way.
~ If you leave 20 quarts of hot tomato sauce in your car overnight, in freezing temperatures, and wrap some towels snugly around it, it will still be hot in the morning.
~ Going into winter with a cupboard full of tomato sauce feels awesome
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