tomato sauce

Another indoor day

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Well, yes, technically it’s warmer today. We are apparently at 7C/45F right now – the predicted high of the day.

The windchill is at -5C/23F

I just got back from giving the outside cats a light afternoon feeding and, to be honest, I’m surprised by the windchill. Yes, it was cold, but I didn’t even bother putting on a jacket or hat.

The winds are high enough that it has started to tear off the plastic wrapped around the bottom of the isolation shelter. I made the doorway larger for a purpose, but with the ramp down, it’s just too open.

The plastic is also just being held in place with push pins, because it is temporary, but this plastic is just dollar store dining table protector. It’s not particularly thick or strong. We will probably have to reinforce the edges somehow – not so easy, with it already attached to the shelter.

After re-tacking the plastic with the push pins already there, I came about out with more and spent some time adding more, including some more strategic places. Hopefully, it will hold until we can find some way to shelter that entrance.

It took a while for me to do that, which is part of why I’m surprised by what the wind chill was. I was directly in the wind the whole time and yet, it was chilly, but -5C/23F? I knew my tolerance for cold has increased as I got older, but still…

Except my ears. I should have dug out the ear muffs. Getting wind in my ears causes headaches, and I can feel one coming on now.

Well, tomorrow is supposed to be a bit warmer, and Friday is now projected to reach a high of 10C/50F, with no high winds predicted, so I might be able to get some stuff done out there, after all.

Until then, it’s another inside day.

Last night, I got another tomato sauce started in the slow cooker. I had more ripe tomatoes this time and had to really pack them in there to get anything else in. Along with the tomatoes I included the last of our eggplant, some onions, a shallot, some garlic and a couple of carrots – we had to actually buy carrots this time – whatever seasonings struck my fancy, some olive oil and apple cider vinegar. That was set on low for 10 hours, and then is stayed on warm until we could get to it again.

This morning, I blitzed it with the immersion blender until smooth, set it on high for about an hour, then back on low for a few more hours. At this point, the lid was propped slightly to let moisture out, and it was stirred frequently, as the sauce thickened.

Earlier today, I cooked up a big batch of pasta, then used some of it as the base for a pasta sauce, adding it to some cooked pork bits and melting in some cream cheese, then tossing the pasta in it. I made just enough of the sauce for my husband and I, as the girls have very different tastes.

The sauce is now being left to cool, and whatever is left from what we use today will be put into freezer bags and frozen.

The sun will be setting pretty soon – it’s setting at 4:44pm today – so I’ll be heading out to do one more light feeding for the outside cats before it gets fully dark. This gives them a better chance to eat it all before the skunks start coming out. Maybe racoons, too. I haven’t seen any in a while, but that doesn’t mean they’re not showing up!

This morning, my younger daughter joined me for my morning rounds, so I could show her my full routine, for the next time I have a morning where I’m in just too much pain to do it myself. She knows I’m not a morning person. She also tends to go to bed a lot earlier, and wakes a lot earlier, so she offered to take over the morning routine for me!

I might actually take her up on that.

We shall see!

Oh! A skunk just showed up on the critter cam… gotta go!

The Re-Farmer

Ready for the freezer

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I let the tomato sauce we made yesterday cool over night – with the current overnight temperatures we are getting right now, the kitchen gets really cold, so there were no concerns there!

This morning, I ladled it into some size medium Ziploc bags.

We did use some of it last night, while it was still hot. I still ended up with 6 bags for the freezer.

I left them on the baking sheet in the freezer, so they’d stay nice and flat while freezing.

Once this was done, I prepped more pans, then washed and sliced some Black Beauty tomatoes to dehydrate. Only 2 pans fit in the oven. I should look into getting extra oven racks. With enough oven racks, we could use all our 9×13 baking pans at the same time, and have room to spare for air circulation.

Something to keep in mind over the next while.

Anyhow, those went into the oven on the lowest “warm” setting, which on our new oven is 145F. I left the oven door propped open slightly with a wooden spoon to let the moisture out. It’ll still take a long time, though. Some of the slices ended up a bit on the thick side.

I also completely forgot to take any photos!

I’ll be sure to take some when it’s time to flip them.

The main thing is, these could stay in the oven to dry out, and I could go do other things. I was intending to get to the trellis bed again, but that didn’t happen. You’ll see why in my next post! I’m pretty excited about it. 😊

The Re-Farmer

Tomato sauce is done!

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It took a while, and I had to pause part way through to do other things, but it’s finally done!

Here are photos of the process. I didn’t really follow a recipe, but rather used a number of different recipes I found online to use as a guide.

After selecting the ripest Roma VF tomatoes, I gave them a wash and left them in the water while working on the onions and garlic. I wanted those on the bottom of the roasting pans to make sure they would get completely immersed in any liquid released by the tomatoes. I wanted them to cook until they were so soft, they’d disappear into the sauce.

When it came time to process the tomatoes, things went a lot faster than fighting with those little onions and garlic! I was going to leave the skins on, so I only needed to cut the stem ends off (and any damaged bits), then give them a squeeze. With the shape of the Roma, it was easy to do it sort of assembly line style, cutting the ends off and lining them up on the cutting board, cut side down, until the board was mostly full, then squeezing the seeds out into a bucket for the compost.

A handy tip to make things easier: place a cutting board inside a baking pan with low sides. I have a whole bunch of 9×13 baking pans that are perfect for this. They are large enough to fit a cutting board with room to spare to catch liquids or keep items handy, and the sides are low enough to not get in the way of my hand or the knife as I cut.

All the recipes I found had the amount of tomatoes by weight – usually 4 lbs. I had no idea how many pounds of tomatoes I had, so I just winged the quantities for the other ingredients, and split everything between the three pans.

After all the tomatoes were cut and seeded, I added more olive oil and carefully turned the tomatoes to coat them, while trying not to move the onions and garlic on the bottom too much.

The recipes I found had oven temperatures ranging from 300F to 425F, and while some had cooking times, most were “until the skins start to blister”.

I decided to go lower and slower. I put the three roasting pans into a 325F oven. I checked them at about 40 minutes, then added another half an hour.

While they were roasting, I went and got some fresh oregano and thyme. I didn’t get a lot of oregano, because the plant is mostly blooming right now, and the bees were loving the flowers. So I just found a few smaller stems. I picked about the same amount of the thyme sharing a pot with the oregano. We have German Winter Thyme in the old kitchen garden, but the seed pack for these ones didn’t include a variety name.

This gave me a chance to try out the herb chopper I picked up at a Dollarama not long ago. It came with a cutting board with a recess matching the curve of the blades. It did a pretty good job, though with the slightly larger oregano leaves, they sort of got caught between the blades while just rocking it, so it needed to be lifted and shifted with each cut. That was not as much of an issue with the thyme leaves.

I like it.

When the timer went off on the oven, the kitchen needed to be used for other cooking, so I just shut it off and left the pans in the oven. Then, before I started on the final cooking, I made sure to do all my outside stuff and other little things, so they were in the oven for probably 2 or 3 hours. They were still quite warm when I took them out!

When transferring them into my big stock pot, I was very happy to see how softened the onions and garlic were! Exactly what I was after. All three roasting pans really filled that pot!

At this point, I added the chopped herbs and salt. Sea salt, because we happen to have some at the moment. After stirring that in, I turned on the heat, then used the immersion blender on it. Not for long, but that things is very efficient, so there were just a few larger pieces that got missed.

After that, I kept it at a simmer for about another couple of hours, stirring frequently. I tasted it a few times and ended up adding more salt (twice), some pepper, some dried sage, a bay leaf and a splash of lemon juice.

Towards the end, I removed the bay leaf and took the immersion blender to it again. This time I kept it going for longer, so make sure there weren’t any big pieces of tomato skins anywhere.

I like that this pot has a measurement scale inside it. After the first blending, the sauce reached just under the 7L mark. When it was done, it was at the 6L mark. I could have cooked it down further, but I think it’ll be good enough.

For now, the sauce is cooling down. I plan to put it into freezer bags and freeze them, though we will probably use some of it with a meal, first.

I think the next processing I will do is to dehydrate slices of the Black Beauty and Indigo Blue tomatoes. Those can be left in a warm oven, unattended, while I get other work done.

A dehydrator would be a useful gadget, but we really don’t have the space for one. At least not where we also have access to an outlet.

For now, the oven will do just fine, and tomorrow, I hope to get some work done outside at the same time!

The Re-Farmer

Taking a break

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Finally, I am home for the day and can start the tomato sauce. We have tomatoes all over the place, and I gathered all the ripest Roma VF, leaving the Black Beauty and Indigo Blue, for now.

It was enough to fill a kitchen sink.

After going over numerous recipes for roasted tomato sauce, I decided on how I would make these.

I have 3 roasting pans and can fit them all in the oven together.

To start, the bottoms got a generous splash of olive oil. I then took advantage of this and used the smaller onions and garlic. I finished off an entire small braid of onions, which gave me the equivalent of maybe 2 large onions. 😁 I also smashed and peeled cloves from about a dozen small garlic bulbs. That gave me the equivalent of about 2 large bulbs.

I wasn’t too concerned about the proportions in each roasting pan. They will all go into one pot, later. That’s when I will be adding fresh herbs and seasonings.

The down side of using the smallest bulbs is that it took a really long time standing at the counter, prepping them.

My back is killing me, and I took painkillers before I started.

So I am taking a break now.

Next step is to trim and deseed the tomatoes. That’s going to be another long time, standing at the counter!

I plan on leaving the skins, though, as I will be using the immersion blender as a final step.

As for the black tomatoes, once the sauce is done in the oven, I think I will slice the ripest ones and dehydrate them. As much as I can fit on baking pans, at least. There are more Romas ripening, so there will likely be more sauce or paste to make, later.

The Re-Farmer

Making tomato sauce

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Well, it took several hours longer than expected, but the tomato sauce got done!

I filled my large colander with the ripest of the Roma VF we have laying on a screen in the cat free zone, as well as the ripest Indigo Blue Chocolate and Black Beauties, filling the colander to almost overflowing.

After going through a number of recipes, I decided to not blanch them first. The Roma got topped, halved and seeded first, then went into my larger stock pot. I considered doing the other tomatoes separately, but didn’t want to mess with more pots and just mixed them all together.

When we processed tomatoes last year, we blanched and cooked them, before running them through a sieve, so any seeds were no longer viable by the time they went into the compost heap. This time, I seeded them first. I expect we’ll be having some volunteers in the compost pile, next year! 😄

For the seasoning, I kept things simple. I harvested some fresh yellow onions, picking ones the cats rolled on and broke the stems, since those were not going to be getting any bigger. They were a decent size, though, and I only used three of the bunch I picked. The rest got braided and are now hanging in the cat free zone (the living room) with the garlic to cure.

I grabbed a garlic bulb that turned out to have two huge cloves, as well as a bunch of fresh thyme from the pot in the living room. Along with that, I added some freshly ground salt; my husband picked up new salt and pepper grinders to replace our old and breaking ones, and got a container of Himalayan pink salt chunks for the salt grinder, too. I also added a bit of sugar and lemon juice.

Once the tomatoes had stewed long enough that the skins could be easily removed, I sautéed the onions and whole garlic cloves in some ghee until the onions were translucent. I was going to strain the tomatoes through a fine colander I have, but I couldn’t find it, so it went through a large sieve, instead. This sieve has a quite fine mesh on it. I don’t know how much difference it would have made if I’d used the colander, since there really wasn’t a lot of pulp in there, but the end result was more like tomato juice than tomato sauce!

Which is why it ended up taking much longer than expected to cook it down to a more sauce like consistency.

All those tomatoes had filled my larger stock pot. By the time I strained out the skins, it barely filled half of my smaller stock pot. I cooked it down until it seemed thick enough, then poured the sauce into sterilized 750ml canning jars. I was able to fill two, plus maybe a third of the last jar. That one got a twist off lid. In the photo, the whitish chunks are the broken up pieces of garlic cloves. Mmmmm….

They are now sitting out to cool over night, and then they’re going into the fridge. There isn’t enough there to bother actually canning the sauce.

I think with the next batch, though, I might take the time to make tomato paste again – this time on the hot plate on the dining table, to free up the kitchen, like we did last year. I don’t expect to be making as much as we did last year, and we only got a dozen 125ml jars of paste at the time. They went over so very well, though, they didn’t last long. That’s why my original intention had been to grow so many paste tomatoes this year, and it just didn’t happen. Hopefully, we’ll be more prepared, next year!

Altogether, this took about 5 or 6 hours to finish. If we’d been working with more tomatoes, I would have broken out our giant stock pot – the one that’s big enough to brine a turkey, with room to spare – to cook down the tomatoes. That’s what I used to make the paste last year.

We still have plenty of tomatoes resting on the screen in the living room and, of course, lots more on the vines, so we will be doing this again, probably a couple more times.

I did get a bit of a nap in before I started, but I am still so very tired. I’ll expect I’ll be sleeping on the couch again tonight, too. The family did keep checking on my room, and my husband even had Snarly Marlee in the living room to give her a break from the kittens for a while, and there were no new messes. Hopefully, things will stay that way, but my mattress is still damp from the previous ones.

I so look forward to getting cats and kittens adopted out!

Speaking of which, still no sign of The Phantom. The Cat Lady and I have been discussing alternatives if she doesn’t show up, and tomorrow she plans to drop off a trap for us.

Still no interest in the kittens she shared photos of.

Since they are friendlier and easier to catch, she’s going to see about booking us to get a bunch of males fixed, next.

As much as I’d like to get the outside cats fixed and adopted out, we really need to adopt out more inside cats. Some of them are inside only because they were going to get taken and adopted out, and it just didn’t end up happening.

Ah, well. We’ll figure it out.

The Re-Farmer

Making yellow tomato sauce

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There are only two people in our household that enjoy eating fresh tomatoes, but even they are getting tomatoed out when it comes to the Yellow Pear tomatoes! They were starting to accumulate, so I decided to make a small batch of tomato sauce.

Along with the Yellow Pear tomatoes, there were about five or six Chocolate Cherry tomatoes, and two Cup of Moldova tomatoes on hand, so they wall went into the pot together!

Being so small, they got mushy very quickly, so it wasn’t long before I was running them through the finer colander we have. Some of the seeds still get through, but no one seems to mind that. If I were making a tomato paste, though, I’d run it through a sieve as well, to get rid of the seeds.

After straining the tomatoes, I fried up some finely chopped onions and garlic in some olive oil until soft, then added the strained tomatoes back to the pot. For seasoning, I added salt and pepper, a bit of sugar, and a bay leaf, then cooked it down until slightly thicker.

It wasn’t quite enough sauce to fill a 750ml jar.

What a colour!

Not too long ago, I found some large mouth screw on jar lids – usually I can just find regular mouth. Since this is going into the fridge, I much prefer to use the screw on lid, rather than the canning lids and rings. I’ll have to pick up more of these when I find them again. Most of the canning jars we have are wide mouth jars.

Not being a fan of tomatoes in general, I didn’t actually taste this to see how it turned out. I’ll have to get my husband or daughter to do a taste test and let me know what they think!

The Re-Farmer