I have been working at canning tomatoes for about sixteen hours, taking a few hours to make and serve dinner for some portion of 100 high school football players.
At nearly the end of the day, I have five more quarts of whole tomatoes and seven quarts of tomato sauce. I used the recipe and directions from Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
. I added some brown sugar and I think it will be very nice with meatballs.The recipe can be found at Kingsolver's website http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/.
All the rest of the tomatoes are not yet ripe and I guess I'll get a week off to catch up with laundry and housecleaning. My husband is tired of canning and he hasn't stirred a pot. My boys complain that it is too hot to can, as if I can wait to winter to do it. Clearly, they don't get it.
It is hot and long work. I do just fine as long as I stay on task. Every time I'd try to get in a load of laundry, I'd overcook the tomatoes. But the tomatoes too soft for whole tomatoes were fine for the puree needed for the tomato sauce. It reminds me to focus on the task at hand. The shelves are filling with tomatoes for the long winter. It's a calming sight. I can imagine all the dinners to come until ripe tomatoes return next summer.
Tonight, an unusually hot one, my bed will feel cool compared to the kitchen and I will sleep well, dreaming of tomatoes.
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