Tomato Sauce

So last week(ish) I solicited your tomato sauce advice and expertise, and you gave it. Thanks especially to Jen B. and Di, who sent me their family recipes! I ended up combining several recipes, because it's hard for me to actually follow directions :)

I will be unveiling pictures soon! I ended up with 10 quarts of tomato sauce- woo hoo!! ....

Here's my preserving count so far:

18 pints and 1 quart of canned Peaches
10  4 quarts of Tomato Sauce
5 quarts and 1 pint of Chili (frozen)
9 half-pints of corn (frozen)
1 half pint of blueberry jam
7 pints of pickles

My goals for the next month are:

12 pints of baked apples/apple slices
10 pints of applesauce
4 pints of apple butter
4 pints pumpkin pie filling (frozen)
5 quarts butternut squash soup (frozen)

Also on the Homestead front, I've got 30 heads of lettuce ready to plant outside for the fall and 20 more heads started that are incubating inside. I also started a few dill plants and basil plants inside, with hopes of keeping them inside until the spring.

I've bought some Seeds of Change seeds on sale for next year, including cherry and roma tomatoes, pumpkins, lettuce, and onions. I've saved seeds for bell peppers, and some hot peppers and well, and my friend Steve is supplying me with some Korean melon seeds that will be an interesting science experiment :)

I started late, but boy did I get going!

What have you put away this summer?

the Grape Jelly Debacle

So grape jelly..


Not so easy to make. Of course, when canning, Ashley and I never follow the directions to a perfectly. In fact sometimes we are quite liberal with our canning freedoms. But that is completely beside the point!! ..right?

:)

We didn't have a cheesecloth, or a jelly bag thing or really any of the technical items needed to make jelly. But we did have concord grapes! So now we have grape soup-juice. But we're hoping if we magically let it sit overnight and try to boil it some more, that it will turn into jelly.

I think that sounds probable.

This is why I should stick to cooking. You can make shit up when cooking, and things still turn out pretty good usually.

We ended up making some attempt at jelly, and then I showed Ashes how to make my not-yet-famous-Butternut Squash soup. But it's really more of a stew. Basically you throw a bunch of stuff into a pot and then it tastes good. See- that works with cooking! So we cooked 3 pints and 1 quart of that.

I'm also cooking some apples now that will eventually be applesauce! a huge vat of applesauce.


yummm! Hopefully we'll have a few quarts of that. I might run out and get some pint jars. I just don't think a quart of applesauce is too practical. I'll never eat that fast enough before it spoils.

BUT a really exciting thing was that now that our compost bin is set up, we could compost all of the food scraps from canning!! See below:


Apple cores and peels, grapes skins, grape seeds, the ends of the squashes, etc. Very exciting. Before, all that stuff just went into the garbage! Now it can go back into my garden.... eventually.