Lots of work, little reward...

Much like we keep hearing about 'peak oil', I recently survived 'peak cherry tomatoes'.  For most of the past two weeks, we were getting 30-40 cherry tomatoes a day out of the garden, and getting them used was challenging.  Some of them went in the dehydrator, some went in the freezer, and some got made into salsa, and some went into work to be given other homes. 

And some of them were still sitting on the counter...staring at me...questioning my dedication to use what we were growing. 

Time to experiment!  Observe...my first attempt at canning my own tomato sauce!

 

It's not spaghetti sauce...it's 100% tomato sauce.  Adding things like onion and pepper and zucchini and carrots would effect the acidity of the sauce, requiring pressure canning instead of Water Bath Canning...so, I took the easy was out, just to keep the cherry tomatoes from going bad.  Now we can use that as a base for

 

A lot of spaghetti/tomato sauce recipes call for you to peel the tomatoes...but I couldn't imagine doing that with a few pounds of cherry tomatoes.  Instead I cut them in half and squeezed the seeds out of them, then tossed them in the food processor...for a while.  I then poured them through a strainer to get rid of the few stubborn pieces of skin that were left.  I dumped the product into a sauce pan until I was happy with the thickness of it, and canned them up, adding a little lemon juice to get the acidity right.

 

But boy, did it take A LOT of cutting and squishing out seeds to make two and a half pints of tomato sauce.  It was only slightly more annoying than having to pit cherries...