Behold the Tomato

I've finally come up for air from the vast mountain of ripening tomatoes that has been gracing my house for a few weeks. I'll miss having garden fresh tomatoes for sandwiches, salads, and stir-fries, but at the moment, I'm just relieved. There still are some in the garden--we haven't had a hard frost yet--but the rush is over. I've processed enough to see us through the year. Perhaps two.

Roma tomatoes, also known as Italian or plum tomatoes, are much firmer than *regular* tomatoes. There is almost no juice to them. I've dehydrated enough of them to fill an ice-cream bucket. I've made a big batch of salsa and canned 10 pints. I made pasta sauce, also canning it in pint jars (the right size for two people). For both the salsa and the pasta sauce, I filled two 5-quart slow cookers with all the ingredients, then let them sit uncovered on low for 16-20 hours until the right thickness, then canned them. Works good for batches the right size for us.

Also with the romas I canned over 30 pints of roasted tomato sauce. We just love this stuff; the flavor is so rich. It can be used as a base for soup, as a pasta or pizza sauce; last night I used it in a spinach lasagna. Mmm.

The regular tomatoes just got chunked and canned for future reference. I still had some on hand leftover from other years so only canned about 20 quarts and 25 pints. I was thinking of making tomato vegetable soup to can but I ran out of energy, and with the canned tomatoes I can make the soup any time in just a few minutes. With hubby working out of town, having ready-to-eat homemade soup makes a nice lunch for him at work.

Of course, there still ARE some tomatoes in the garden and if it stays warm this week, I might get tempted to make a big batch of soup yet. Or not. I'll have to think on it.