So I looked at my calendar, and I realized that this coming weekend is the Last Weekend In August (gasp!) and that the next two weekends are weddings, and the weekend after that I'm helping my brother put in his front lawn. I really want to can some tomatoes this fall -- so it looks like I'm canning this weekend.
My own puny garden doesn't have enough ripe tomatoes to make one meal's worth of spaghetti sauce, let alone enough to can, so I called up Paul's mom, who had suggested that I come out and raid her garden. I took her up on her quite generous offer, and returned home last night with an enormous haul: a bushel of mixed tomatoes (romas, beefsteaks, and these huge safety-cone-orange two-pound wonders called Kellogg's Breakfast), four peppers, two eggplants (including one as big as my head), an enormous bouquet of basil, a pannier full of tiny apples and pears, and a beautiful bunch of black-eyed susans.
I got home and I set to work. I made an ice-cube tray full of pesto, roasted the huge eggplant for babaganouj (one eggplant, five cups of baba -- it was enormous) cleaned, sorted and removed bad spots on the tomatoes and then made dinner with the results. We had fresh baba and corn chips, sliced tiny apples with pesto, and sliced tomatoes with sugar, salt and pepper. Heavenly.
After all that, I even got two full pages inked. Go me.
So now we have two full pints of baba and a pound of pesto in the freezer, and Saturday I'll make tomato sauce and can it. Shouldn't be hard; I'll just run the 'maters through the vittorio strainer, add garlic, onion, red wine, pepper and fresh herbs from the garden, and keep an eye on it all day as it simmers. Once it's done, probably on Sunday, I'll heat it up again and then water-bath the jars. No sense in doing all the work to stew tomatoes, only to have to make them into sauce each time I open a jar. Much more logical to make the sauce up front. I also will be drying a good portion of the romas for Paul's mom, who loves the oil-soaked sundried tomatoes I made earlier this year. mmmmm.
Yay for harvest time.