What do you do with all of these?

Tomatoes harvested last week.

Well, Tim made some more pasta sauce. He blanched all of them and peeled them, this time remembering to cut the stem out first. Then he asked "how can we take the seeds out?" and I remembered this (scroll down to thingamajig). Nancy had dropped this off a while back and I'm glad I remembered it. The kids have been waiting to mash something in it and they went to town. It made it so much easier to remove the seeds and pulp. It got a little messy but they had a blast.

Smashing Tomatoes (not to be confused with Smashing Pumpkins)

I was shocked at how much sauce we got out of those tomatoes. And the compost pot filled up quickly. Which btw, our compost is half full already. And you can see how it's turning into black gold at the bottom. Our gardens will be very happy next year!

Once the tomatoes were all sauced, Tim went to making his magic. He used everything out of the garden except the garlic. Which got me to thinking that I would like to try and grow garlic next year. He used zucchini, green peppers, garlic, basil and oregano. He ran the veggies through the blender so that Aidan wouldn't realize they were in there. Last time he added Parmesan cheese but this time we didn't. I wanted to can them and wasn't sure about the cheese. When we reheat a jar, we can add the cheese at that point, or not. He let the big pot of sauce reduce down until it got all thick and yummy looking and then I canned 6 pints of sauce. I processed it for 35 minutes in the water bath. At least I hope it was 35 minutes. I thought I had set the time, but apparently I didn't. But, I was outside talking to Debbie and Nancy for a good bit and I also got a bunch of lines done of knitting. They all sealed up almost immediately after taking them out of the water.

sgetti sauce!

While Tim was cutting stems and blanching and peeling tomatoes, I tackled a project in my notebook. It was brought on by the fact that I saw mouse poo in our pantry...and after digging around I found a dead mouse. Ugh. I didn't see what the little guy had been eating. Probably the dog food and Patchy's cookies. I moved them up to higher shelves and completely tore everything out of the pantry and reorganized it. I realized when it was done, that we don't have nearly the stuff in there that I thought we did. Time to start restocking the cupboards. Of course, that would explain why our grocery bills went from almost 200 dollars a week to 95 dollars. We were just eating out of the cupboards and the garden. I'll start restocking beans and stuff again this week.

clean cupboard...a little bare, but that will be remedied.

So, after a weekend of a lot of rain and a lot of canning, we are starting the week with more rain and cool weather. I have to go make a loaf of bread and work on some laundry. I'm hoping to get out into the gardens and do some weeding if it dries out a bit and I need to get some grass cut. I suppose I should get off the computer and go get started on one of these projects. Have a great day!