tomato processing

Well – the thunder rolled in Wednesday afternoon (7/18) and Jan and Walt and I thought that being outside wasn’t the smartest place to be for dinner…so we headed to the Mexican restaurant instead.   Oh, my goodness…it has been SO LONG since I had Mexican food…and it was HEAVENLY!!!!  I even got to bring home a bit and had it for dinner on Thursday as well!  Thursday morning (7/19) I headed off to quilting after picking up Nancy.  I think I am finally finished making the 300 and some 1/2 square triangles, so I finally started to sew them together into blocks.  It will probably take me many more weeks to get the blocks finished…then I’ll give them to Michael to arrange into a charity quilt. One of the ladies at quilting (Loree) has a large garden and brought in a bunch of produce for any who wanted to take it home.  I told her I was waiting until the end, and then I was going to grab any remaining tomatoes.  She said she was ready to rip up her TWENTY_FIVE tomato plants because she was tired of picking – processing-canning-resting, over and over and over again.  I told her I’d love to have any extras she had.  Well, once I got home she called me to ask if I really did want more tomatoes…she and Reg (her hubby) swung by my house and dropped of a peck of tomatoes, some squash and 2 LARGE cantaloupes…what a great haul.  When I went to bed Thursday night, I was still trying to decide how I was going to process those tomatoes, but by the time I woke up, I knew.  I certainly felt like ‘becky-homecky’ on Friday morning.  This is what I started with:

I cored and mostly seeded the tomatoes over a sieve, so that I could save the tomato juice:

 and then I halved or quartered them placed them on a greased cookie sheet (I don't know why this picture is so blurry....I wish it had shown that way when I took it so that I could have taken another one....oh well...you get the idea!):

I mixed up some olive oil, balsamic vinegar, tiny bit of sugar, salt and 5 large cloves of garlic that I had hoped to drizzle over the tomatoes.  Well, for some reason, the consistency was like toothpaste….so I kind of dabbed on with a brush instead:

I roasted each sheet at 450 degrees for 30 minutes (until they got a little carmelization), then started to put them into baggies for freezing.  After I had a couple filled, I thought better of it and ran downstairs to write BG and ask her opinion…we both agreed that they should be whirled up before being frozen, so I got out my stick blender and went to work.  After tasting, I added a couple of gobs of the olive oil/balsamic mixture…..OMG…..I can hardly wait to eat this sauce!!!  This was the final result, 4 quarts of sauce and a quart of juice (for winter soups)…AND all of the ‘waste’ got buried in my garden to enrich the soil:

This took 3-1/2 hours to complete and clean up from, then Donna came over for a bit of help on her sweater.  She left about an hour later and I cleaned the house and myself and settled down to wait for Michael to get home.  They got caught in Charlotte traffic and he didn’t make it until 7 PM.  We popped the champagne and collapsed on the couch for some TV watching and snuggling!