You know when you wake up and you just know that you’re going to get a lot done today? Well that’s how I felt this morning. I knew that I wanted to can the tomatoes and also help Daryl with the shed that he’s been working on.
First things first. Get the kitchen set up. I put out all the tomatoes on the table and sorted them out. I’m kind of weird about canning stuff and don’t want to risk anything going bad by having used something that I shouldn’t have. So if the tomatoes even look like they might be bad – it was chicken buffet time. I was glad that there wasn’t too many that fit this category because I bought them and then the next thing is to decide what I want to make with them. I decided to make some canned whole tomatoes, some boring pasta sauce (nothing else added to it) and some garden pasta sauce. Can you tell that I like the garden pasta sauce better? The first thing is to see what I needed for the canned whole tomatoes. Jars – check. They were in the dishwasher just getting done on the sanitize setting. Which by the way is such a good thing on a dishwasher!! The next thing is to get my big white enamel wash pan and bucket. Check. Now for the canning salt. hummm. I thought I had some in the cupboard. OK, so not cool! So I put on some ‘town clothes’, tried to do something with my hair, brushed my teeth and headed to town. I thought I was better at being organized than this! But I figured that I won’t run into anyone at the farm store and as long as I’m there I’ll also pick up some canning lids. Well for a Holiday weekend, the store was packed. And of course I knew about half of them which usually how it goes for me. With the salt and the jar lids in my bag, I was back home in about 35 minutes. Not bad since it takes me about 15 minutes just to drive to town. Finally I was in the zone. I had the whole tomatoes in the water bath and a roaster full of pasta sauce just ready to go. So if you do any canning, you know that there is some ‘down time’. What I mean by that is in between when the jars are in the water bath and you have to put the next ones in, you can do other things. And with Daryl working on the shed it really worked out good. I would put the jars in the water bath and then run out for 40 minutes to help him.
Work continues on the cattle shed
Then I’d run back into the house, take those jars out and put the next ones in. Pretty slick huh? Now according to the recipe, the jars are supposed to be in the water bath for 40 minutes. And depending on what I was helping Daryl with, I’m thinking that some of them could have exceeded that time! Yup, pretty sure that they did. But more is better in this situation right? I was even able to get a run in later when Daryl was working on cutting some steel, so I was really happy how the day was turning out.
At the end of the day (12:30 am on Sunday) I finally took the last jars out to cool and got the kitchen cleaned up.
This is what I started with
My tomato stash this morning
and this is what I ended up with. Not a bad days work.
What I used the tomatoes for
Now we’ve got all our work done that we wanted to get done today which is Great! I was asked to go kayaking with a group of girls on Sunday but with working this hard today, Daryl and I decided that we’re going to do something fun ourselves tomorrow! I’m excited to see what we come up!!