Have you all been waiting with baited breath to see what 40 pounds of tomatoes looks like? (Umm…yeah, it was 40 not 50 THANK GOD.) Please forgive me for not immediately posting a picture, because you can sure bet that I took one the second that I hobbled into the house under the weight and spread them all out on a table.
Nice, huh? And though you can clearly see a few oozy ones in this picture, let me assure you that they were few and far between. These are lovely tomatoes with super extra bonus points for about 15 percent of them being Amish Paste and Brandywines! Hurrah!
(I ate the Brandywines.)
There was a slight mishap with the pickup as I thought we were getting thetomatoes at his house and in fact we were picking them up at the farm, but we did get to mill around his yard for a while and watch his turkeys watch us.
Wow those are ugly birds. But I bet they are delicious.
By the time we realized and rectified the error, picked up the tomatoes and made our way home it was about 7:30 and I insisted on jumping right in to the canning. Thanks to some silly ideas on my part, it went very, very slowly last night and we didn’t finish until past 11 and only had two quarts and three pints to show for it, one of which didn’t seal. And they are probably all chock full o’ Botulism. Mmmm…neurotoxins…
But tonight I got home (after spending 45 dollars at the Plymouth Farmer’s Market, God help me! It isn’t like I don’t have every inch of counter space filled with some vegetable right now. Sometimes I am not the best planner in the world. But there were sweet potatoes! And lard! How could I stop myself? HOW?) and was much for efficient and here I am now with 4 Quarts of crushed tomatoes and 3 pints of tomato bits/juice quietly bubbling away just before 9 PM and oh there is my timer…
Bollocks…all floaters. I don’t know how to make them not do that. But they are sealing! The third one just pinged. There is seriously no better sound in the world, I think.
I’ve still got about 40% of them left, which I hope to finish tomorrow. And then deal with 7 heads of cauliflower and the carrots that I still haven’t pulled from my garden.
If you have the freezer space, stick any that didn’t seal into the freezer. If you don’t have the freezer space… go to Sears and pick up the cheapest small self-cleaning freezer you can find… 🙂 You can also use the freezer to freeze whole tomatoes that you don’t have time to process. We did this a couple of weeks ago when we were going to be away and had a ton of tomatoes needing processing. Just washed ’em, de-stemmed ’em, stuck ’em in bags and threw ’em in the freezer. When we finally had time to deal with them, we pulled them out of the freezer, skinned them using the boiling water technique (nick the skin, throw them in boiling water — frozen tomatoes need maybe 5 seconds — and then peel the skin right off) and cooked them down from there. Did that again last night with all the ones we picked because of the frost advisory; hopefully we’ll have a chance over the weekend to process them. And overnight low was 38 — no frost — so we’ll hopefully have more by then…
And yeah, that little ‘plink’ is the happiest little sound! 🙂
Ohhh!!! I think those blue slate turkeys are handsome!! But as you know, I’ve got a soft spot! 🙂