I have never made tomato juice before. There I said it! You would swear by the amount of tomatoes that I have canned these past 30 some years that I would have made something similar right? Well I have to confess. I never really drank any tomato juice until about a year ago. Yea, can you believer that too? But I’ve tried the boughten spicy tomato juice about 4 months and I’m telling you that I’m really diggin’ it! I think I’m addicted. But each serving has 27% of your daily sodium and I can polish off a bottle of the stuff almost in front of your eyes, so needless to say I can get a little puffy. Yea, not really a good look.
So I’ve been researching this past week just what kind of juice I should make. Now I do like spicy stuff but decided on a recipe that was just a regular juice. The recipe called for I think 6 lbs of tomatoes. But to be honest I’m not really sure on the amount that I used. I took a what was ripe and then washed and quartered them. Next I roasted them in the oven and into the pot they went. 
The recipe did call for onions, so I used what I had left from the garden and that went into the food processor along with a couple of green peppers and some banana peppers from the garden. Next into the kettle was some jalapeno peppers and some salt and pepper. Well you can see by now I just kind of tossed in what I had in the kitchen. The next thing though was to add some parsley. I was careful to watch for my little friend from the garden on the leaves and brought into the kitchen the amount that it looked like the picture in the recipe. It smelled pretty potent so I only added half of the amount. The last thing to cut up was a lb of carrots and a whole bunch of celery. 
And soon it was smelling pretty good. 
I added some canning salt and what I can tell from the internet is that you should never boil the juice just keep it really hot. Well when it finally got cooking I tasted it I thought HOLY SMOKES! all I could taste was parsley!!! Yikes! So I went out to the garden to see if I could find some more tomatoes and luckily there was some that was close and so into the kettle they also went. It still tasted a little funny so I thought I might as well add some sugar. It was about the only thing so far that I didn’t add so I thought ‘why not’? When it on the stove for awhile I finally took it off and the next step was to use a food mill. SCORE! I bought one a couple of years ago when it was on sale for a half of a half deal. You know one of those times when your’e not even sure what you should do with it but it was so shiny and cool that you just had to buy it? Well that’s what I did and I was excited to use it. 
Well I dug it out of the storage and after a quick wash I was ready. It didn’t take long to get the hang of it and when I was all done I had two full kettles of juice. And guess what? It didn’t even taste too bad! Maybe it just needed to get mixed up or something.
Finally it was time to can them and I ended up getting 9 quart jars of juice. I put two in the fridge and will try to store the rest for the winter. 
I did notice that most of all the recipes called for 2 TBSP of lemon juice and a tsp of canning salt. 
So I did add that to the juice and then I water bathed the jars for 40 minutes. Now one jar didn’t seal so it gave me a chance to taste the concoction and I think I can taste the lemon juice. I’ll give it another taste try later this week and see what I can find out before my next batch. But for now? Well I can drink about a quart a day when I’m thirsty so I’m sure hoping that I find a recipe that I really like and that my tomatoes all ripen soon!
And guess what I did with the stuff that I got out of my food mill? I thought it was such a waste with tomatoes, onions, carrots, celery, and other stuff in it to just throw away so I put it in my dehydrator and then after it was dried I ground it up in my food processor. 
It smells really good and I was thinking that I could use it in some goulash or stews this winter. If it doesn’t work out so well, I guess it’ll be garnish for the chickens. 🙂 