Nephew Tom and I went to the Clearspring Produce Auction last week and bought 5 bushels of tomatoes. They were selling them in 5 bushel lots and I asked Tom if he thought 5 bushels was enough. I really thought we should buy 10, but Tom is much wiser than his uncle and convinced me that we only we needed 5.
This morning we marshalled our resources and started canning.
We quartered tomatoes and crushed them and cooked them and juiced them and canned them for hours and hours and hours. For most of the day we had all 6 burners on my stove covered.
10 bushels? What was I thinking? Why did we even buy 5?
We didn’t have enough to do, so we also made hot sauce.
This is an amazing recipe from Ian Knauers, “The Farm.” It’s just diced hot peppers that you leave sit on vinegar and sugar and salt for 3 months. It makes the most flavorful hot sauce you can imagine. We added two scorpion peppers we bought at the Columbia City Farmers Market. Like thinking you need 10 bushels of tomatoes, tasting a scorpion pepper is ill-advised. Both Tom and I can attest to that.
We did eventually can the last tomato. Being an engineer I arranged them all in orderly rows.
That’s a bunch of tomatoes![1] The engineer in me wants to count them and report the number of quarts and pints of each type of juice and sauce, but it feels so good to sit down that I’ll leave that to tomorrow.
1. Yeah, that’s a glass of wine in the background, and I’m going to have another before I go to bed!
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