The wonderful benefit of having 2 cases of tomatoes

[Clipper]

The advantage is that you have 50 pounds of tomatoes and a really broad choice of which one you want to slice for your tomato sandwich with Hellmans mayo. Yum. Loving my mater sammich. Kathy is back at it this morning, canning more tomatoes. It is a tedious and long process to can that many tomatoes. She is still working on the first box with another 25# box to go after this one.

[Deleted]

She is gonna be dreaming about tomatoes for a long time.

[Clipper]

She is probably going to have nightmares. She put up 12 quarts of spaghetti sauce today. It takes forever to cook down and thicken. I had a nice tomato sandwich on rye this afternoon for lunch and tonight when she asked what I would like for supper, I told her BLT's so we had BLT's with potato chips on the side and a couple of home canned dill pickles.

At this rate she has probably at least 3 more days of canning tomatoes. I told her if she gets sick of doing it, we can just whiz some up in the food processor, bag them, and freeze some of them plain, to be used in chili and soups. this Friday the husband of the women that sold us the tomatoes will be at a flea market in Gate City Va, about 30 miles from here and will have bushels of cucumbers. We may grab at least 1/2 bushel to make up some more bread an butter or dill pickles. We eat a lot of the canned stuff ourselves and Kathy has a great following with her lady friends and she gives away quite a few jars of stuff. I told her that she needs to charge a deposit on the jars. She gives canned stuff away but the jars don't always come back.

I don't know what variety these are, but they are all the size of a softball or bigger and are nice and deep red and sweet, with a meaty inside.

By the time the pickle and tomato canning season is done, we will take a trip to Waynesville NC for a bushel or so of apples. We peel and core them all. She puts them up with sugar and cinnamon and vacuum packs them for the freezer. We have apples for pie, cobbler, and apple cakes for the entire winter and most of the summer.

[Deleted]

Holy cow Clipper you and Kathy have some huge operation going on at home. It sounds like my Grandparents from Italy did way back in the 30's to 70's. My Grandfather had a huge vegetable garden the size of an average size lot for a home to be build on. He had it way down Miller St. Enjoy

[Clipper]

She is canning more stuff than she usually does. The garden is not producing as well as it usually has in the past so we are buying stuff to supplement what we are getting from our own garden. I think we took on quite a chore without thinking how long it would take to cook down and can all 50 lbs of tomatoes. Probably won't do THAT again, haha. She is a great baker and we love her apple pie and an apple cake recipe that the makes. We normally always have apples with the sugar and cinnamon added in our freezer. It is a lot of work, but the results are food that tastes much better than the commercially canned stuff we could buy in the supermarket.

We have a chest freezer in the garage to supplement the freezer drawer in our bottom freezer fridge.

[chris]

All I have to say is you are one lucky guy Clipper. BTW guess what I had for lunch today

[Clipper]

Uhhhh! Let me guess. LOL

She took a day off today to rest and get off her feet. With her neuropathy her feet swell and the pain reaches unbearable levels if she stands for too long. She suffer to matter what she does. She also suffers if she sits in the truck too long and her feet start burning. She says she wishes that she never had the FIRST surgery. The Slocum Dixon surgeon that did her first surgery at Faxton screwed her up and it has taken 5 more surgeries to straighten out his screw up.

Tomorrow she says she will get back at it. She puts them in boiling water in order to loosen the skins so she can peel them. She is just going to peel them, pulse them in the food processor a couple of times and vacuum pack them for the freezer. She has already canned 8 pints of sweet chili sauce, 10 quarts of stewed tomatoes with peppers and onions, and 10 quarts of spaghetti sauce. The rest can be frozen and thawed as she needs them for chili, pasta sauce, or soups as she needs them.

We are getting older. Gardening gets a little harder for me to keep up with each year, and the canning gets to be too hard for Kathy. She used to can green beans, peas, and beets. We used to buy bushels of corn to be husked, blanched and frozen. Along with prepping apples and freezing them for pies and cakes, she used to cook down an entire bushel for apple sauce. We decided that SOME of that stuff can be purchased as cheap or cheaper than what it costs to can it or pack it for the freezer.

[kit]

Just as working hard for a week and getting that paycheck on Friday makes it all worth it, putting-up 50# of tomatoes "when the sun shines" will be well worth it in the winter months when fresh tomatoes are scarce.

When my 2 brothers and I were kids my mom grew and canned many different kinds of fruits and vegetables and we ate very well in the wintertime. She loved it. It was probably a carryover from the tight times of the Great Depression and WW-II. Her Victory Garden was always full and lush. Sadly, she passed away when I was 14 and it's never been the same since. What's available in stores is just not the same, with all the preservatives, flavor enhancers and other chemicals they add. Kathy has the right idea and I'm sure you're both much better off eating her canned goods.

[Deleted]

My Grandmother just canned whole tomatoes with basil in the jars and then processed then. In the winter she was able to make her sauce for pasta. I never knew you could process the tomatoes in a food processor then vacuum freeze them. That seems a lot easier.

[kit]

PB... what was the technique your grandmother used to vacuum freeze the processed tomatoes? Can you describe it?

[Deleted]

Clipper is vacuum sealing the processed tomatoes not my Grandmother.

[Clipper]

I didn't word that right. She will process them and then when cool we will vaccum seal them in bags and freeze them.

[Deleted]

Does she grind them up first in a food processor. Clipper?

[Clipper]

She pulses them a few times in the food processor, after blanching them in boiling water so she can take the skins off. After she pulses them she cooks them, cools them to room temperature, and then will vacuum seal them in sealer bags and freeze them.

I don't really keep track of what she does in the kitchen when she gets a project like that going. I just stay the hell out of her way, haha. I went out there to the kitchen the other day when she was canning and she had tomatoes cooking on one burner, jars sterilizing on another, filled jars in a hot water bath, and the entire kitchen counter covered with completed jars, waiting for the lids to pop and seal as they cool.

UPDATE! I misspoke again. She says that you can't vacuum seal the bags of liquid on the machine. She is going to put them in Ziploc bags and freeze them. She has a recipe from a friend on how to do it. We vacuum seal about everything we buy with the seal-a-meal thingy. I just assumed that was what she was going to do when she said she was going to freeze some of them. Sorry to keep everyone confused.

[kit]

As long as she knows what she's doing, you'll be eating well all winter.
One question... did she get the recipe for her spaghetti sauce from an Italian grandmother here in the Utica area?