T is for Tomato

And for Tired, unfortunately.

This is what 100 pounds of tomatoes look like (two boxes of 50lbs each)

And many, many hours later this is what 32 quarts and a pint of tomatoes look like.

I did buy a fabulous machine this year which in Italy is called a "passa tutto"  (pass everything).  It uses a hand cranked "worm drive" to drive raw chunks of tomato through a sieve, spitting out watery sauce and pulp at one end and seeds and skins at another.   It save a huge amount of time skinning and seeding the tomatoes, but I generally use a lot more chunky tomatoes than sauce.  You also have to spend some time cooking down the sauce to a reasonable consistency.  I cheated and left it overnight over a tiny simmer flame, although you could also do it in a crockpot with the lid off (I had two crockpots worth of raw juice, so it was too much work to try to stagger it/ transfer the sauce etc.)

Fortunately the pain will fade, and I'll be able to enjoy lots of spaghetti, chili and other tomato-rich dishes all winter.

I heart my pressure canner

Spent a fair bit of quality time with my pressure canner last weekend, and it was great.
I love to cook.  Cooking, reading, and bicycle related stuff are my hobbies.  Home improvement I would call more of a compulsion than a hobby.
I find it really relaxing to cook, a good way to unwind after a long day (especially when combined with a nice bicycle ride home).  Unfortunately I'm not a big leftover maven.  Leftovers are fine for lunch, but I'm not one of those people who can make a big batch of something,  eat it for dinner, eat it for lunch, eat it for dinner etc until its gone.  However there are enough days when I get home at 8pm and I need to put dinner on the table in a hurry, that I can't always cook, and my puritan side is reluctant to call for takeout.  The classic home cook's response to this dilemma is to pull something lovingly home cooked out of the freezer and have something lovingly home cooked and slow simmered in less than 15 minutes.  Unfortunately my freezer in my small fridge is tiny.  There have been discussions about putting an auxiliary freezer in the basement, but no resolution.

For now, I'm really enjoying canning stuff.  Pretty much anything that you can freeze, you can pressure can.  Unlike water bath canning, it doesn't have to be acidic, because the pressure allows you to bring the temperature up to 240 which kills just about anything that can grow anaerobically.
I've been canning a lot of beans, which is a great and cheap way to make good quality beans with flavor and known ingredients that are ready in a hurry on a Wednesday night.

So I was craving goulash last week now that it's getting chilly.  I was kind of tired when I started the recipe and I misread two things.  First, I used sharp instead of sweet paprika.  Then I accidentally doubled the amount.  It was pretty much inedible.  Fortunately I made it in the pressure cooker,  and it only took me 30 minutes to find this out instead of the three hours the recipe called for.  So I put it in the fridge, and went back to the grocery store the next day to get ingredients enough to double the recipe.   doubling everything else made it tasty, but now I had a LOT of goulash.  So I canned the extra half.  Now instead of having to dig through the depths of the crammed freezer, I can just pull it off the shelf, and be ready as soon as the microwave can bring it from room temperature to warm.  My future self is thanking me some cold night at 8pm...

The fruits of my Labor (day)

My canned food pantry is nearly filled back up, and boy does it look pretty!  Ok maybe I’m biased.

Last year I canned tomatoes, peaches and some pickles with a water bath canner.

This year I decided that I would be a little more ambitious and invested in a pressure canner to be able to can low-acid foods safely.  I canned 35 pounds of hatch green chiles (carried home from Whole Foods very slowly on poor Robert’s rack),  15 quarts of tomatoes (so far),  4 pints of spicy pickled green beans and 8 pints of cooked heirloom beans. Canning tomatoes is much easier using the pressure canner because you don't have to hot pack (cook the tomatoes first). 

 I use a lot of cooked beans,  but I often don’t use a whole pound batch at once,  and don’t have the freezer space in my tiny fridge for the rest.   I’m excited about being able to can my own, adding flavors and spices and then pull them off the shelf whenever I need 2 cups of chickpeas…