My parents were recently going to be out of town for two weeks, right around the time that the tomatoes in my mom's garden were likely to ripen.  "I'll keep an eye on the tomatoes" I told my mom.  Every few days we went to the house and picked tomatoes - at first they could all fit in a basket, later we needed a bucket.  That was okay by me - I had my new tomato press on hand, a canning pot that I'd purchased years ago at a family auction, and was armed with jars purchased at the fleet farm. 

Fifty pounds of tomatoes later, I was thankful that the garden was as small as it was, and doubly-thankful that I wasn't planning on putting up a whole years worth of vegetables.  Home-canned goods are delicious, but it is no small effort to prepare all of the food and do the actual canning.  And that doesn't even count all the effort that goes into raising the vegetables (thanks momma!).


I made three kinds of sauce.  The original is based on a recipe I found in a canning cookbook and turned out to be a touch spicy, meaning that my kids wouldn't eat it.  And only seven jars of that on hand!


The next batch I skipped the crushed red pepper, omitted the onion and garlic, added some red wine.  Then, when I made the third batch, I decided to go ahead and add some onion and garlic, but I'll pretend that it isn't in there if the kids ever ask.


For that last batch, I put half of the mild into jars then threw a handful of quartered green olives into each jar.  Who knows how it will taste.  My guess is tasty and salty.  Well, for sure it will be salty.


I thought it was great fun making the sauce, and the kids are quite good at operating the tomato press.  By the time we finished processing all fifty pounds of tomatoes, we were like a well-oiled machine.  A machine that was covered in pulp and seed bits, but a machine none-the-less.