Tomatoes 102: Spaghetti Sauce

I'm not sure on this, but there has got to be some Italian in my family history.  I LOVE Italian food!  I love cooking it, eating it, and sharing it.  With all these tomatoes ripe in the garden, it's a great time to make spaghetti sauce.

When I was growing up I wanted nothing to do with the sauce-making endeavors of my mom and aunts.  They would can... I would run away with a book.  But now I see the value.  It's more economical, tastes better, and is healthier!  Plus the bonus of knowing it was provided through the earth and rain given to us by the Lord -- satisfaction!

Now this recipe is handed down, originally published in a small-town Arkansas community cookbook.  I added a few tweaks for my own taste.  Therefore, it's not copyright as it's my own version of the recipe.  In fact I do so many batches each year, I've committed this one to memory.  This may contradict the "never wing it" philosophy, but generally if your core recipe is the same, you can change seasonings with no problems.

Makes: 6-7 quarts of canned sauce; 

1 quart = 8 servings; 1 pint is great for a large deep dish pizza; 8oz for a regular pizza.

Ingredients:

4-5qts whole tomatoes

2 green (bell) peppers

3 jalapeno (hot) peppers

2-3 pounds red onions

4 cloves garlic, minced

I start with the food processor to make it fast!

2T each: basil, parsley, oregano, thyme

6 bay leaves

1/4 c grated Parmesan cheese

1 1/2c sugar

1/2c canning/preserving salt

1 pt olive oil (EVOO for stronger flavor)

8 small cans tomato paste (or 4 large ones)

quart and pint jars, rings and lids

canner & tools

before cooking

Step 1: Tomato Base -- get your tomatoes ready for the sauce by blanching the skins off in boiling water (see first tomato post - doing this ahead of time can ease some of the work at sauce-time) and then chop the amount needed (4-5qts of whole/canned tomatoes).  I like using the food processor at this step because it's not hot yet -- less chance of burning myself.  You can also rough chop them yourself and then puree it later -- your choice.  Chop 2 green peppers, 3 jalapeno peppers, and 2-3 pounds of onions (I like the flavor of reds) -- add it to the tomatoes.  Add 4 cloves minced garlic.   Stir well bring to a boil and cook for 1 hour, stirring frequently to prevent sticking.  I recommend using a screen over the top to let it cook down without spattering your kitchen with orange polka-dots.

after 1st hour of cooking

Step 2: Prep Flavor -- While that is cooking, chop herbs and combine in a 1qt container -- 2T (1/8c.) basil, 2T parsley, 2T thyme, 2T oregano.   I like fresh -- you'll have to really pack them in the measure, though.  If you don't have fresh, dried will work.  My first choice is, naturally, fresh or dried from my own garden (sometimes herbs are ready and tomatoes are not).  Second choice would be quality store-bought herbs. This will increase the cost of your sauce, but if you don't have an herb garden, what can you do?  Add to this  1 1/2 cups sugar, 1/2 c canning/preserving salt, 1/4c Parmesan cheese, 6 bay leaves.  Set aside.

Step 3: Puree -- If you did not use a small appliance to chop earlier, you can do this step now to get a nice smooth sauce. You may use a food processor or a blender.  I know some people who like it chunky garden-style.  If that is you, skip the puree.  I will say I think it's a bear to do it at this point as the sauce is HOT!  I do the pureeing earlier.

Step 4: Season -- Add the bowl full of seasonings, sugar, and salt to the pot.  Stir well.  Add 1 pint of olive oil or extra virgin olive oil.  It's your choice, but of course EVOO is twice the price sometimes.  I find the regular stuff works well, though I believe EVOO is healther.  Stir well and bring it back to a boil.  Cook for 40-45minutes.  Get the canner started boiling in this frame of time, too.  It can take up to half an hour for the boiling water bath to be ready, less for the water in the pressure cooker as it uses less water. It's your choice which canner you use as they take about the same amount of total time.

Step 5: Thicken -- Add the 8 small cans of tomato paste and stir well.  Cook another 15-20 minutes to finish the 2nd hour.  Watch your spatter screen and burner temperature as it will bubble more and stick easier at this point.

Step 6: Can -- Have clean jars at the ready (when in doubt as to how clean, wash them again -- always!), and start heating them in a shallow pan of hot water (rim down).  Do the same for rings and seals (lids).  This sterilizes them and gets them hot enough to work properly, hopefully without cracks in jars or failure to seal.  Use a canning funnel and ladle the finished sauce into hot jars.  Wipe rims with a clean damp rag.  Messy rims will prevent sealing.  Place and adjust 2-piece caps, place jars in boiling water bath or pressure canner, your choice.  Keep little kids out of the kitchen as this shoot steam during the cooking process.  Below are the cooking times -- no skimping on time, for your own health.

• Boiling water bath (very large stock pot): cook quarts 40-minutes, covered with at least 1-2" of water, boiling.  Remove jars to draft free location to cool.
• Pressure canner: bring it to 10 pounds pressure (recipe originally said 5#, but I only had a 10# wt and that worked), cook quarts 5 minutes, let pressure come down to 0 naturally.  Remove jars to draft free location to cool.  (By the time you deal with pressure numbers, it still takes 30-40 minutes.)

Step 7: Store and Serve -- Remove rings and make sure the lids sealed by pulling gently at them (if not put it in the fridge and use within a week).  Store with your canned goods.  The less light and extreme temperatures, the better.  I keep mine in the jar boxes.  One quart is enough for 8 servings of pasta.  This also works well as a pizza sauce if you have little leftovers in a pint or less.

This is one of our favorites, I've done 3 batches this year and plan on more as the tomatoes hold out.  We've also made many types salsa, taco sauce, and can tomatoes whole to use in chili over the winter.  There are so many wonderful things you can do with tomatoes!  However, I have to keep the eating of them to once a week or tell my ulcer to pipe down!  The sugar in this neutralizes some of the acid, but not all.  Voila -- homemade convenience food!

What a savory delight and convenience it is 

to have this, like other canning recipes, 

ready to go on my shelf!

Free Ranging and Egg Finding

Oh, my chickies have grown up so fast it has amazed me!

And the fact that my little farm-boys have matured with them is not lost on me.  Well, two of them have anyway.  DS1 is still working on the impulse control -- he lost chicken access for the entire month of August; we shall see when September comes.  DS2 wants let them out, put them away, and feed them.  He's definitely an animal lover.  However, it's to the point where he wants to put them away and will keep himself awake at night hoping I'll give in and let him go out with me to close the coop at night.  DS3 really digs finding the eggs -- he's so solicitous in checking at least 5 times a day.

Now, these things sometimes exasperate me.  There are times when their helping causes them to fight over who will do said chore. There are times when they get so excited about the chickens that they remind me of the monster in the Bugs Bunny cartoon squeezing vigorously with, "and I will hug him and love him and call him George!"  Yeah... I can almost hear a chicken saying... Please stop loving me!

Free-range chickens!  How fun it is to watch them.

We've started letting them free-range in the yard. It's healthier for the chickens -- more natural -- and saves on buying commercial feed.  It's good for the grass, too!  However, it means a foot-washing at the end of the day (our boys are barefoot backyarders). As for the dog, Tula leaves them alone for the most part. She doesn't hunt, just herd. Only problem is the chickens follow her directions and go back to the pen, so we sometimes keep her in the house when they are out and about.

Enjoying the grass and bugs.

They seem to make laps through the yard, as a flock.  Out of the pen, into the straw in the shed, under the truck, down to my empty salad garden for a dirt bath, find some bugs in the herb garden, peck in the dirt and grass near the fence, up to the grapes for more bugs and old fruit, then around the hosta bed and back to the pen area.  Other times the loop takes them back around the garage to the pumpkin patch and down to the firewood piles and strawberry patch.  It's fun to watch a chicken realize the others have moved on -- wow, can they run!



A caviat on free-range.  You may step in "fertilizer" while walking through your yard.  You may also find eggs in odd places.  So far we haven't, but I have a friend who found a stash in the grasses out in the yard.  I heard of another who found them in the hay baler.

They are just fun to watch -- I think I may institute a half-hour of quite chicken-watching when I can each night #serenity!

This week also saw the end of an era -- no more MR in our coop.  He took after DS3 a few times; he was not causing terrible injury, just a scratch and a peck.  Still, I wouldn't keep a dog that bites my kids, and I wouldn't keep a Roo that does the same.  The other reason was that he was jumping ON the hens... as in that kind of jumping.  No thanks, would like to eat eggs for breakfast, not chickies.

Note Mr Red Roo in the center -- bye bye bird :(

So today while the kids were at school and DS3 and I were at MOPS, DH took care of the messy business.  I'll not gross you all out with details... don't want activists upset.  It was humane, it was practical.  He is in the freezer... we don't kill to let an animal go to waste.  We've already begun this training with the boys. As their interest in target shooting grows, they will eventually want to hunt.  They understand we only kill an animal for food or to protect ourselves or others -- and we waste as little as possible.

We now can say we are getting eggs regularly, too!  I think our girls started laying a little early because the older one was eating the layer feed.  To begin with the older hen (our foster chicken Speckles) was laying her eggs under the coop when it was so hot this summer.  Now they've all figured out the nesting boxes, and are laying regularly!  In fact they seem to have no qualms about laying in "someone else's box."  I'm blessed and thankful to be able to share out of our abundance!  They are small now (except for Speckles' egg) so we use 2 peewee eggs for 1 large/extra large egg in recipes.  They are already getting bigger, so I'm sure they will continue to do so.

Community nest  -- we are getting 6-8 per day!

Now, through this process (and harvesting season in the garden) -- I'm just amazed into be grateful to the Provider for the food in front of us and the work of our hands that brings it about.  It really is a joyful experience to let everything you do be for His glory.  Not because I provide food for my family, but because He does!  I'm just the one who gets to muck out the coop ;)  Blessings to you and all of your endeavors, messy and joyful alike!

Tomatoes 101

Now that the tomatoes are growing and you are starting to see red... what do you do with them?

Yummy romas -- my favorite for sauces.

Well in growing, you plant, feed, prune, tend, etc.  Yet with the arrival of fruit you are constantly on the run from the garden to the kitchen.  I pick at least every other day, in season.

In preserving tomatoes, you can freeze them -- they loose their texture though so don't do this expecting fresh tomatoes in January.

If you are canning or making any preparation/sauce you start with taking off the skins.  Now, I personally find it more manageable to do this step the day before I prepare/can a recipe.  It cuts the amount of dishes and the time needed to process it down into a more manageable chunk.  If I didn't get to be mom at the same time, I'd probably do it all at once, but I just can't do everything all at once anymore.

Tomatoes 101 -- Remove Skins

1. Pick and store until fully ripe (sometimes they are slightly orange and the flavor and flesh will be better after a little sun).  I like to use these open flats from the garden center as the tomatoes don't end up rotting in a bath while ripening.

2. Clean your tomatoes.

3. Core -- you can use a knife, but a good friend clued me into this nifty gadget -- a strawberry/tomato huller.  It's a lot like a tiny melon-baller, but note the jagged teeth.  It's a very economical tool and it makes the process go like a breeze!

4. Blanch the skins off.  Drop cored tomatoes into boiling water for just a few minutes.  You will see the skins crack when they are ready.  *Do not over cook at this step -- it may ruin the texture of the tomatoes depending on what you are making.  Dip them out with a slotted spoon of your choice.  I like the spaghetti spoon for small ones, a frying spatula/dipper for bigger ones.




5. Drop them into a cold water bath -- this cools them enough you can handle them and helps the skin separate so you can peel the loose skins right off.  FYI -- my chickens won't eat the skins without fruit, so these can go straight to the compost.

6. Use or store.  Like I said, I do this step the day before sauce-making, so I put them in containers and store them in the fridge.  You can drop them directly into your food processor or on the cutting board if you are dicing them or making your sauce/salsa presently.  If you are canning them whole (or the large ones, halved/quartered), from this step you drop them right into the hot, sterile jars. Check your canning cookbook or manual or the steps and proportions of lemon juice and salt needed.

A last bit of wisdom from the hearth and home:

"You cook the tomatoes and you make sauce and you put it in your refrigerator.   When you are out of sauce you need to get more sauce or make salsa, because I like salsa."  ~DS3

There you have it... out of the mouths of babes... when you get tomatoes you make sauce or salsa :)  Stay tuned for lesson 2.  Until then, blessings to you!

Pickled Beets -- Love 'Em or Leave 'Em?

So pickled beets are an acquired taste, I know.  Many people either love 'em or leave 'em.  I find that people who like tart/tangy things like sour foods and pickles like them.  My picky eater DS1 will eat only select vegetables: raw carrots, corn on the cob, fresh salad, broccoli [on occasion - steamed with lemon], and pickled beets.  So I planted beets last year -- with the intention of canning pickled beets; the homemade ones have much more flavor!  I got 6 pints out of last year's crop -- so I tripled the planting this year!  So far I'm at 11 pints and more still growing in the ground.

FYI beets are a cold-weather root vegetable.  They need the cold to germinate; planting in July is not going to get you much.  They are about 55 days to harvest.  The deep purple variety are the most commonly grown (aka the garden beet); I planted back in April, and did a second planting where the groundhog robbed me of a few sprouts.  And for the last month I've been harvesting!  They will keep in the fridge for up to 3 weeks (or more, if it's cold and in a good veggie bag).  I use the green zipper produce bags to keep things in my fridge until I get enough to make the canning worth my while.  Things typically last 1-3 weeks in those!

I'm on my second batch of pickled beets -- the first was about a month ago.  We don't eat them any other way (though I may get gutsy and try a beet salad this year).  My kids and I can down a pint at a meal, though the husband (healthy eater extraordinaire) turns his nose at them!  Ironic, huh?  Isn't it said that the darker the color of a veggie, the healthier it is?

So here's the how-to on one of the boy's favorite veggies -- Pickled Beets!

Pick [pull, really] the goods  --  they look like this (left) out of the ground.  The chickens LOVE the greens.  Or you can use tender greens in a salad, I've heard.  Not tried it myself, though.


Clean, Cook, & Drain -- Cook for 30-45 minutes in steamer basket (minimizes vitamin loss) until fork-tender.  My mother in law suggested the pressure cooker, but I've not done it that way, yet.  Drain and let cool a little so they can be peeled.

Syrup -- Start simmering the solution that will pickle the beets, at this time.  The Ball Blue Book recipe calls for whole cinnamon sticks and whole allspice.  This recipe is a solution of spices, sugar, vinegar, salt and water (get the book to get the proportions please -- never guess on canning recipes!).  Now's a good time to start your boiling water canner, too, as it takes a while to boil.

peeled

Peel, Slice & Pack -- Peel the beets, then slice (if desired) and pack in hot/sterile canning jars.  Often the peels will slide off the cooked beets, if they don't use a veggie peeler and it will do the trick!

cover

sliced

release any bubbles

Cover -- Ladle liquid over the beets, leave 1/4" headspace.  Use a plastic tool to remove air bubbles in the jars, and place the two-piece caps.

packed

Process -- Time to can it, gang!  Process in boiling water bath canner (front left in the photo) for the prescribed amount of time.  Remove and let cool away from drafts for 24 hours; test seals and put in storage!

four burners -- canning central

Voila' -- tasty veggies that will last the winter!  Friends have said how much they dislike beets -- but to me pickled beets are like veggie candy!

I love the way canning extends the garden through our whole year!

Bloom Where You Are Planted

Do you remember how I told you all how I pray for neon signs?  Things I'm supposed to do or not do, things I'm supposed to learn; insights and motivations alike.  Well, this summer I have been bombarded by this one: Galatians 5:22.  "The Fruit of the Spirit."  A simple verse that many memorize in Sunday School.  Except as a young thing, that SS attendance was spotty at best for me.

So over this summer the good Lord has bombarded me with this one amazing verse!

First I was praying through it for my sons during the Warrior Prayers Challenge, which motivated me to make it our verse for the summer.  My three boys have learned it (for the most part) and respond accordingly when I interrupt bad attitudes with, "Give me some fruit!"  They know they can't argue with it (says so in the Scripture, kids)!

Second, it shows up on Facebook in a picture (one of those visual quotes) posted by a friend -- "Bloom where you are planted."  It immediately drew my mind to the fact that I, as a mom, have to choose to bloom -- to be content and show all the fruits of the Spirit, even when I am not feeling it.

My creative juices get flowing and I start noodling around that image with the fruit phrases...and oh did I long to make it happen!

The pastor preaches on a similar topic -- making a choice to grow and he says the same thing (maybe he's on Facebook?) "Bloom where you are planted."  Oh I'm getting the neon sign feeling at this point and know that Jesus is telling me to write this one on my gates and doorposts, so to speak.  Old Testament advice, still applicable: write it on your home and teach it to your children, let the Word of the Lord be a part of every bit of your day!

So, the kids were asleep last Friday, the hubby was working late, and I had just had a cup of coffee ~ 2am art-session coming up!

I have some florals in my basement entry way, so got some color ideas and started painting... and painting...

Today I arranged it on the wall -- where I would see it when I rise in the morning (heading up for coffee and breakfast), when I'm coming and going (by the back door), and when I'm ready to call it a night (back to bed).  

It needed a little something more -- some blooms.  I took the flowers leftover from the wreath I got the colors from and made a little bouquet to go with it.  It may get tweeked...not sure it's quite right, but at least it's done and on the wall!

Put it all together and it was almost exactly what I had imagined -- nothing fancy and yet totally what I need to see 1000 times a day!  My hope is that as my boys learn to read, it will be a reminder to them as well!