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

Green Tomatoes

As usual I have a glut of green tomatoes squatting on my plants.  It's almost like they were taunting me because I know that they will never turn red before the frosts get them.  It's frustrating because this year has been terrible for my tomatoes.  The spring was unseasonably cold up until June and then it went straight to 90 degree weather.  So I got only 10 ripe tomatoes this year.  And yet here are dozens of big beautiful green ones on the plants just a week away from red deliciousness if it were only warm enough. 

Yesterday a hard frost was predicted for our area so I went out and pulled all our tomato plants and then harvested every good sized green tomato I could find.  I decided I didn't want to bother with the whole covering up the plants every night in the hopes of getting a few red ones.  Also I detest pulling tomato plants that have been frosted on.  Not only do they turn disgustingly slimy and gross, but they also seem to be considered some sort of gastronomic delicacy to wasps.  So while your handling the slimy vines you also are being attacked by stinging insects.  In my life its just easier to pull them up and throw them in the truck bed to take them to the dump.

After that I brought them all inside I went through and weeded out any damaged ones and wiped off all the good ones I carried them down to the basement and put them in a single layer to slowly ripen.  

Green tomatoes don't need sunlight to ripen (contrary to popular belief) and actually do better if ripened slowly in a dark well ventilated room like a basement.  I got the instructions on what to do from my much loved and useful book The Encyclopedia of Country Living.  There is of course a whole section on what to do with green tomatoes and recipe ideas.  With luck we will still be eating tomatoes into November.