It was rainy and cool here today (finally, we need the rain!). The perfect day to spend some serious tomato time in the kitchen.
My in-laws are away this week, so in addition to watching their house and dog-sitting, we’re raiding the garden. After a really long dry spell, the garden has really slowed down. But not the tomatoes. Goodness no, not the tomatoes.
I’ve already canned enough tomatoes to say I did it. I’m looking for new ways to save these. So, thanks to several people who’ve been doing this much longer than I have, I have three plans for the ‘maters today: roasted veggie sauce, dried/confit, and salsa.
I started with the roasted veggie sauce, since I knew the dried tomatoes would use the oven for the rest of the day (did I mention the rain?). So I preheated the hotbox to 400 degrees, and I cored, squish-seeded and chopped tomatoes, and threw them in the roasting pan along with a couple green peppers, a fennel bulb, two red onions, carrots, a small eggplant and some basil.
Next, into the oven for 45 minutes. And while that cooks…
I decided to tackle some free apples from a tree at school. I wanted to freeze some apple pie filling, and I found a recipe in the Ball Blue Book that looked fairly easy. I peeled, cored and sliced the apples and tossed them with lemon juice (the original recipe calls for using the Ball fruit treatment), sugar, flour, cinnamon and nutmeg, and let the whole thing sit for 1/2 an hour to get the juices flowing.
Now, with tomato sauce roasting and apples sitting, I turned my attention to slicing tomatoes for drying. I cored and squish-seeded more tomatoes, and sliced them (too thin, it turns out). I placed them on parchment-lined cookie sheets and sprinkled with coarse salt and a tiny bit of sugar.
By now, it was time to take the sauce out:
I turned down the oven, and in went the tomato slices. Since I wanted to let the sauce cool before processing it, I turned my attention back to the apples:
I brought them to a strong simmer until the juice/sauce started to thicken, and I got two big freezer quarts out of the mixture. Each one is probably not quite enough for a whole pie, but probably enough for turnovers (unfortunately, those made it to the freezer before getting their picture taken).
Finally, it was on to the salsa. I am concerned about killing people with canned goods, so I adapted the Ball Blue Book spicy tomato salsa only enough to fit the ingredients I had. But I kept the same ratio of tomatoes and vinegar, and didn’t add any more veggies than the original calls for.
After bringing the canner to a boil, and preparing all of the accompanying doohickies, I simmered the salsa, then canned and processed it for 15 minutes.
I ended up with five pints (the recipe said 8-9 half pints, but I didn’t have any little jars). Whoo hoo!
And after processing the veggie sauce:
I ended up with three good quart freezer bags full.
Finally, the tomato slices were dry. I obviously cut them too thinly, so with the next load of tomatoes, I’m going to do some more and cut them thicker. I’ll keep these to add to that batch.
Oh well. I look forward to adding those others to these to make some pretty jars of confit.
The apple tree at school was visited by us again today, too, so up next….applesauce!
Phew. I feel like I’ve made a real dent in my freezer space, and that I can really eat locally many days out of the week during this winter.
