100 pounds of Tomatoes

I like tomatoes… all kinds of tomatoes and tomato products and I can’t seem to keep enough of them in my house.  I use them in everything from soup to pasta, chili to pizza!  I wanted to be sure I had more of these on hand than I made last year.

Along with all other foods, I paid slightly more for my tomatoes this year at $18.50 per box of tomatoes buying 100 pounds.

100 pounds of huge bright red beautiful tomatoes at .74 per pound wholesale and very, very fresh from the Farm Market.  These tomatoes were as big as my hand.

I kept some tomatoes out for fresh salads during the coming week.  The rest of them were blanched, quartered, cold packed or steamed and milled.  Into the bottles they went.

The tomatoes that weren’t cold packed with salt and lemon (for preserving purposes) were either made into a wonderful spicy salsa or heated and put through the food mill.  Then the tomato simmered all day long to make homemade tomato sauce; a new experiment to see if I could make a good working product

 

  and how I would like it.  By the way, the tomato sauce is just two ingredients and is pure BLISS on homemade pizza, we have discovered.  There’s nothing like it and I know that Nathan is secretly eating tomatoes in this form. 

Yet a few more tomatoes were sliced and put into the dehydrator to make sundried tomatoes.  You can’t buy those at the store at .74 per pound!  I love these for my Italian dishes and salads.

Aside from fresh tomatoes for eating that week I made 5 pints of salsa (I still have a little left over from last October), 2 quarts of sundried tomatoes, 14 pints of tomato sauce (enough for 28 pizzas) and 27 quarts of quartered tomatoes.
Let the warm rustic scent of tomatoes waft through my home all winter as we make good things to eat.

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