Fun at the farm. . .

So this post is going to be less about ways to eat and live better and more about how much fun I had last weekend at the farm where our CSA  box comes from.  Every year, as a thank you to being a farm member, Eatwell hosts two tomato saucing parties.  They invite whoever wants to come out to turn 1800 pounds of tomatoes (roma, heirloom, beefsteak, etc) into whatever wonderful concoctions you can dream up - for free.  All you have to bring is the propane stove, your utensils for cooking, chopping and blending and your jars - they supply the tomatoes, onions, peppers, basil, water and pressure canners as well as the spacious hoop houses with lots of tables.

The hoop houses where the canning is set up.

  This year was my first year and my sister Meredith came out with me to be my sous chef.  I wasn't really sure how much I would get canned but I was hopeful it would be a lot (I bought 48 quart jars which ended up being a little too ambitious). Meredith and I arrived at the farm 30 minutes early to make sure we had a prime spot, unloaded our turkey fryer, dual propane stove, two coolers, blender, pots, cutting boards and 2 five gallon propane tanks and got things hooked up and ready to go.  Within an hour of arriving, a wonderful concoction of freshly picked tomatoes was boiling away on our stove and the turkey fryer water was heating up ready to sterilize jars.

The sauce just after coming to a boil - the foam boils away after an hour or so and it reduces by about a 1/3 before it's ready for canning.

The recipes that I had spent hours looking for on the internet were the easiest and the most flavorful I  could find.  Making tomato sauce had previously been a little off-putting to me because it is so much work - boiling the tomatos, putting them in an ice bath, peeling the skin off, slicing, decoring, deseeding, draining and then boiling down before processing in jars.  I found a great recipe online that said to just wash your tomatoes, slice them in quarters, remove the stem and blend to a liquid consistancy then just boil it for 2.5 hours until it is at the thickness you want and then can for 25 minutes in a boiling water bath canner.  That was a lot less work in my opinion and the added bonus is that not peeling off the skins adds more nutrients to the sauce.  By blending it all up together the pulp, skins and seeds all become one texture and no one would no the difference unless you told them. 

Meredith blending up the tomatoes for the sauce.

  The long part of the process is waiting for it to boil down so while we had our first pot of tomato sauce boiling away we decided to prep the tomatoes and other ingredients for our bloody mary mix.  Unfortunately the recipe I found for bloody mary mix called for peeled, cored and deseeded tomatoes, so Mer and I promptly set in to blanching, cutting and peeling 60 tomatoes.  It was a messy repetitive job but it helped pass the time as we waited for things to cook.  Added to the tomatoes were onions, parsley, worcestshire, tabasco, serrano peppers, celery and carrots.  After all this cooks down for 45 minutes you blend it all up, return it to the pot, check for seasoning and spice, bring to a boil and can in a water bath canner for 40 minutes.  You can drink it with or without alcohol and my little taste test before canning told me it was going to be pretty darn good!

The first batch to come out of the canner.

  We cooked and canned from 10:30 am to about 9:30 pm.  We got 13 quart jars of sauce made and 11 jars of bloody mary mix, plus we made a great meat ragu to share with everyone that night at dinner.  Mer and I learned some valuable lessons that will only help us to be more efficient and organized next year.  We know that we definitely need at least one more pair of hands and an extra turkey fryer wouldn't hurt either.  Eventhough it was a lot of work, we found ourselves planning to do it again before the season is over - perhaps in Mer's backyard.  We would just need to find a cheap supplier of organic tomatoes in large quantities.  Perhaps I'll call Eatwell this week and see if I can get a few more crates of tomatoes and do some more canning this weekend.

  Once you start canning it quickly becomes an addiction!  I encourage everyone to try it out at least once - it makes for great presents at the holidays and what better way to preserve the fresh taste of summer all year round!