Tomato Sauce and More

Bubble, bubble, Toil and Trouble

All those tomatoes we grew are now beginning to get ripe so we've got to deal with abundance of our garden. This past week we've canned 40 pints of tomato sauce, 15 pints of stewed tomatoes and 8 pints of Rotel-style spicy stewed tomatoes. Just to give you and idea of how many tomatoes that is: It takes a quart of tomato juice to produce a pint of sauce. And, it takes around 2.5 pounds of tomatoes to produce a quart of tomato juice. So, it took around 100 pounds of tomatoes to produce the sauce we've canned thus far.

(I do use the pronoun "we" loosely. Jo does all the actual canning, but I help by running the tomatoes through the hand-cranked strainer that separates the seeds and pulp from the juice.)

And, wouldn't you know it, now that the time has come to process tomatoes, we experiencing a heat wave. Our daily high temperatures have been near (or over) 100º for several days now, and are forecast to continue in that range at least until the end of next week. Sunday our thermometer recorded a hight temperature of 108.7º, but that isn't really accurate because the pick up for the thermometer is located too near the pot of boiling tomato sauce.

Tomato Sauce and More