Tomato Sauce: the Ultimate Way to Store Your Tomatoes in Ten Steps

 Tomato Sauce: 

The Ultimate Way to Store Your Tomatoes 

In Ten Steps

After spending the season caring for your tomato plants and picking dozens and dozens of plump ripe red tomatoes.  There is a point where there are too many tomatoes to keep up with and there is only one solution and that is can tomato sauce!  What makes a quick easy dinner like spaghetti even better, then homemade, delicious tomato sauce.

By the time tomatoes are ready, the onions will be as well.  Fresh onions will be a tasty addition to any tomato sauce recipe, but is crucial in this one.

 Recipe 60-75 Tomatoes.  

We are always adjusting our recipe based on how many tomatoes we have available when we are ready to can.

The tomatoes that have green like in the below picture, do not peel as well as the red ripe tomatoes.  If you have plenty of tomatoes, be choosy.

Step 1: Scald your tomatoes by dropping them in boiling water and removing them after 60 seconds.  This makes it easier to peel the tomatoes.  During this step we peel the tomato and squeeze out the extra juice so that the sauce isn't too watery. We put the peeled and chopped tomatoes into the large pot.

 

Step 2: Chop up and Saute Onion: 4 large onions and 1/2 cup of olive oil. 

Step 3: Add the garlic 4 TB of minced garlic with the onion and olive oil and saute until caramelized, but before it turns brown.

Step 4: Add the caramelized onion and garlic to the pot of tomatoes.  Start cooking on medium, and stir often so that the bottom doesn't burn.

Step 5: Add three 12oz cans of tomato paste. Mix well; do not let the sauce at the bottom of the pot burn.  We use tomato paste because it helps increase the concentration of the sauce.

Step 6: Add your spices to the sauce as it starts to boil and the tomatoes soften into the consistency of nice thick sauce.  Add 6 TBs of sugar, 2 TBs of salt, 2 TBs of oregano, and 1 TB of pepper.  Keep stirring that sauce to the very bottom.  Burning the sauce at the bottom of this large pot will ruin the taste of the entire pot. (Trust me, I've done it before)  

Step 7: Taste your sauce and add salt/pepper/oregano to desired taste.  Turn the heat down and simmer at this point while you're gathering your canning materials.  

Step 8: Prepare for canning.  Boil the lids and have clean jars ready.  Pour the sauce up the the lip of the jar; within 1-2 inches of the top.

Step 9: After the sauce is in the cans, add warm/hot water (similar to the temperature of the hot glass of the tomato sauce jars) to the canning pot.  There should be a metal rack at the bottom of the pot so that the cans are not sitting right on the bottom of the pot.  Bring to a boil and boil x 20 minutes.  

Step 10: Remove the cans from the heat carefully and put them on a towel and wrap them with the towel.  This allows the tomato sauce cans to cool slowly and seal properly.

In 10 steps, you have gone from a couple boxes of tomatoes with a couple week shelf-life to 6  quarts of delicious tomato sauce with a couple years of shelf-life.  

Growing Potatoes: A Traditional Maine Crop

Growing Potatoes

A Traditional Maine Crop

This Post is Co-Authored by Angela the Blogger 

and her daughter Alexia, 

who would like to be an author someday.

At planting time, the potatoes themselves are the seed.  To increase the number of plants we get and therefore the number of potatoes, we cut the biggest potatoes in half.  When we plant potatoes, we cover them up in a mound of dirt to keep them  deep and to help the plants stand up and we continue to mound them back up throughout the year.  The photo below is a young potato plant; notice the nice mound of dirt it is sitting in.

Potatoes attract potato bugs.  My siblings and I have the job of plucking the potato bugs.  We have to squish the potato bugs or else they would make their way back to the garden.  This is an important job, otherwise the leaves would be full of holes and the potato plants would not be healthy. The photo below shows the potato plants growing nicely, but there are a few leaves with holes in them; a sign the potato bugs are around and time to start searching for them.

You can tell it is harvesting time when the potato plant leaves start getting a yellowish orange hue. See the photo below for a visual on how they would look.  

When it's harvesting time, we prepare by gathering a potato rake or a hoe and some large buckets.  These tools will both be useful when we're digging for potatoes.  The first step to picking potatoes is pulling up the plants.  If there any potatoes that come up with the plant, we can pull them off and put them in the bucket. When we are done pulling up all the plants, we can use our potato rake and scrape the mound to find and potatoes that have certainly fallen off.  This job takes a few people as we don't want to miss any potatoes blending in with the dirt.  The potato rake can damage the potatoes, so we have to be careful.

When all the potatoes have been collected and are in the bucket, we set down newspaper on the cool dry garage floor where they won't be bothered.  We spread the potatoes down on the newspaper and leave them there for a couple of hours to make sure the moist dirt is dry so that it falls right off.  If this step is skipped, the potatoes would rot in their bucket or box.  This is also the time to sort our potatoes.  The little ones we use that week for a meal with boiled potatoes; straight from the garden to the plate!  The damaged ones should be used right away or cleaned up and canned.  Canning the potatoes might be an extra step now, but it's great for making a delicious brunch later in the year with the potatoes all ready to go. 

This picking season, we used some of the damaged potatoes for homemade french fries.  This is an especially nice treat for us, because we keep our fryer gluten free so that everyone in our family can enjoy it.  When we can't make our own, my husband raves about Gluten Free: Tripp's Farmhouse Cafe and Bakery in Auburn, Maine.  

Twice Baked Potatoes 

Gluten and Dairy Free

Recipe coming soon...

 

Maine Blueberry Season

If you want to cultivate blueberries, you have to plan a few years in advance. It takes time for the saplings to grow to full size and have a plentiful harvest. 

You can spend a lot of money to buy full sized blueberry bushes or you can get the saplings for much less.  I planted 20 little saplings over three days (spending a few hours after work).  I dug a bigger hole then needed and planted the root bulb with our mineral rich garden soil.  We have been adding compost and yes, manure to our soil for years.  Now this little blueberry sapling will not have to work as hard to spread its roots. Using the mulch helps keep moisture in the soil, which helps the bushes produce more berries.

The blueberries are growing where the flowers were  previously.

This is one of our full size blueberry bushes.    This blueberry bush is about seven years old and is a terrific berry producer.

It is great when the berries start turning blue.  Picking the berries is a tasty chore.  One for the mouth and one for the pail. My mom helped with this task while she was visiting recently and she reminded me of the children’s book, “Blueberries for Sal”.

A pile of freshly picked and washed blueberries; ready for baking into blueberry muffins. We have a great gluten free and dairy free recipe... I will update with that recipe card in the near future. Check back soon for one of our family favorites!

We have frozen 12 cups of blueberries this season and have canned 6 pints of blueberry jam.

Blueberry Jam! We keep our recipe simple: 4 cups blueberries, 1 cup of sugar, and 1 TBsp of lemon juice.

Even as we hit fall and the bulk of our blueberry season is over, we can still treat ourselves to fresh ripe berries.

Garden Living: Processing Broccoli

Garden Living

    🥦 Processing Broccoli  🥦 

Broccoli is ready to be cut when the florets have that classic soft look.  It’s too early when it is still firm on top and too late when the flowers actually start to open into their little yellow flowers.  After you have cut the main head of broccoli, leave the trunk as you can continue to get shoots of broccoli all summer long; how much depends on the type of broccoli you have grown.

  

     

       

    
Too Early!

          Just Right!          Too Late!

                                                        

 Fresh broccoli is great right from the garden, but it does need to make one stop in a salt rinse first; we use our sink.  Any bugs or worms that are hiding in that luscious canopy will come to the surface to avoid the salty water, pluck them out and it’s ready for the pot or the fridge for another day.

Freezing broccoli for a later time: from experience, keep the stems short as the long pieces get quite firm and stringy. You could also peel the stems and freeze those in pieces. Freezing should occur the day you cut your broccoli, perhaps the next day with good results, but any later and you risk losing that fresh taste. 

Prepare your space:

• Soak your broccoli in the salt water as described above. Boil a pot of water
• Prepare an ice bath (a big bowl of icy water). You will need to have extra ice ready if you’ll be repeating this process multiple times.

Have freezer bags ready and labeled with the date.

Blanching: 

• Drop your broccoli in the boiling water and set your timer for two minutes.

• Be ready with your handled strainer.  This process from blanching to ice bath should be quick.

• Move all the broccoli to the ice bath and reset your timer for two minutes.

• Remove the broccoli from the ice bath and onto a clean dry cloth or skip this step and put them into the labeled freezer bag.

 

• Move to freezer bag and squeeze out as much water and air as possible and seal.

• Put your broccoli bags in the freezer; a deep freezer is best.

It’s great reaching into your freezer or canning shelf months from now, still eating a variety of veggies that you have preserved!  And it all started from these little plants in a well fertilized earth.

For more information on how to grow broccoli and other veggies in the garden... check out my post 

Garden Living: How to Battle the Elements.