First big preserving project of the year! Tomatoes if you can believe it!

Every week I try to get down to the food bank in our town to donate food and clothing and help out if I can.  In our little community the food bank is very important to the elderly and poor families as driving an hour or more to the next nearest food bank is out of the question.  This time I brought in a 50 lb bag of flour for them and a bunch of heavy blankets.

While I was there I chatted with some other ladies from my church that were also volunteering and I noticed that they had just gotten a huge delivery of boxes of tomatoes.  They looked amazing and I mentioned it to the food bank director.  She just laughed and begged me to take as much as I wanted because they couldn't give even part of them out and the tomatoes would be rotten by the next week. Our food bank only operates once a week.

So I took two big boxes home and decided to make marinara sauce from my favorite recipe.  I put them in my freezer because there wasn't enough to bother with canning since we'll use these up within a month.  It turned out amazing and you can use this sauce for pizza, spaghetti, lasagna, or whatever.  It's the only spaghetti sauce I genuinely like since I'm not  a big tomato fan.  All that is in this excellent marinara sauce is tomatoes, red wine, garlic, salt, sugar, and a little water.  I add onions because I like them and then when I use the sauce I add fresh basil at the end.

some of the tomatoes

blanching the tomatoes to remove the skins

the skinned and de-seeded tomatoes, about 14 quarts

onions and garlic

cheap wine

my huge stock pot that I use for canning and preserving

the sauce before cooking

all done and ready to freeze, this made 9 cooked down quarts

this took me start to finish about hour not counting the cooking down time