Ping!

Remember when I said that I cleaned out my freezer the other day? Well what I found out when I re-organized it was that I had too many tomatoes in it from this summer/fall. See I put them in the freezer as the fall went on with the thought that I’d get them canned this winter. 

Well it’s winter and since I haven’t done a thing with them so far – I better get to it! 

I took about half of them out of the freezer and after dragging up the canning supplies from the basement (OK it wasn’t all that bad!) I was set! 

My plans were to make some fresh tomato juice. So after a quick chop in the food processor, into the big kettle the tomatoes, celery, carrots, & onions went. I left it cook for some time and then I wanted to get the ‘big’ pieces out by straining it. Now this worked pretty good but I found out that I still had more seeds in it than I wanted after it was strained. So off I went to town to get some cheese cloth. I swear that the last time I needed cheese cloth I bought about 2 or 3 extra bags but I just couldn’t find them tonight for anything! 

Now the tomato juice went through the nice new cheese cloth and just like that it looked and tasted awesome!! Shazam! 

After heating it up again and having my jars sanitized in the dishwasher, it didn’t take long to get it all set up and into the water bath for about 30 minutes. Of course the first batch the water was looking a little funny and guess what happened? Well one of the jars broke for some reason and out everything came! So I had to start over with new water and a new jar! Good thing that I like doing this otherwise I think it would make you kind of mad 🙂  

Now the best part! In less than a minute after the water bath you could hear the Ping of the jars sealing and then you just know that it was all worth it after all.