Canned tomato sauce

I took a good deal of my tomato harvest until now and canned tomato sauce. Four hours to get two quarts and two pints. I'm sure in January, I'll very much think it was worth spending an afternoon at it. However, I can see why a person would say "You could buy six cans of Hunt's sauce and it'd taste pretty good and would only take you a few minutes to grab them off the shelf." True enough, I admit. The rest of the excess tomatoes that come in, I'll probably just core, chop and freeze, to use in recipes. I've had a break from BLTs for over a week, so I'm ready to go back to eating those for breakfast. It's really a lovely breakfast, a BLT.

ingredients

baked the sauce

Now I hope I don't die of botulism!

I am already a few days late on mowing (my grass doesn't grow fast, and I do it every 10 days) but tomorrow is the only nice day to do it, so neighbors will have to wait. Then the temps climb back up to the 90s again. Good for squash, bad for human beings.

Cucumbers are really starting to come in, so I've menus for lunches that revolve around various cucumber salads (or cucumber and tomato salads), but in a few weeks, I'll be canning pickles as well. I only plan on doing garlic dills and bread and butter pickles.

The Suyo long cucumbers are really good--tender and sweet. Very much like hothouse English cukes, but you can grow them in your back yard and they're no-fuss plants. It has been so long since I grew cucumbers, I forgot about the spikes. They scrub off super-easy, though, with a clean dishrag. Definitely one I will grow again next year.

I have the ingredients for ratatouille, which I've also taken to roasting instead of stewing. The advantage to making that and tomato sauce this way is that at about 20 minutes in, you can take the roasting pan out and ladle out the excess water. (I put it in my composting container I keep in the freezer and it ends up in the compost pile, but a person could also use it to make a vegetable stock with onions, carrots, and some other veg trimmings.) The roasting of sauce or ratatouille results in a much more flavorful, denser dish in the end, and in a shorter time than reducing on stovetop would take.

Tomorrow lunch I'm making eggplant parm again, using a cup of yesterday's sauce that was left over from canning. I tell ya, I feel totally spoiled by all this healthy and tasty food coming in!