Tomato Sauce

I'm so happy our 200+ tomato plants are doing well this year! Last year we didn't properly amend our pitiful soil and the poor plants didn't do well at all.

We don't eat a lot of the tomatoes themselves, but we're kind of tomato sauce eating fiends.
We found this method of tomato sauce preparation via pinterest, and I think I'm in love. It cuts the cook time down to a fraction of what it was.

Basically, all you have to do is cut your tomatoes up, cook them, and drain them well. The juice that you drain off will have some solids in it so it will still be red. So of course, if you boiled all the juice down you'd get a slight bit more sauce than you would with this method.

We drained the tomatoes over a milk pail to save the juice
 

On the other hand, since we canned all the drained-off juice, there was no wastage like there is when you boil the juice down letting it evaporate off.

Look at these beautiful jars of tomato juice!

After draining the tomatoes as well as we could, we ran the pulp that was left in our colander through what is affectionately known around here as the "popper".

The popper hard at work ;)

If you do any tomato processing, jam making, apple sauce, or apple butter making, etc. you need one of these. I'm not kidding. My mom has had the Velox Tomato Press , as well as the Victorio strainer for at least fifteen years, and the "popper" far outshines the Victorio. The only drawback is that you have to have a smooth surface for the suction cup to stick to.
Anyhoo, back on the topic. The tomato pulp that came out of the strainer was almost thick enough that we didn't have to boil it down at all! in fact, my suggestion was to just let good enough be good enough.

Look how thick that is!

Mom decided to try letting the sauce evaporate a little in the crockpot over night though and this is what we got:

Not bad right?! We'll definitely be doing this again - probably many times over as we pick tomatoes ever-other day.
P.S. Please excuse the mess in the background - we're messy cooks! :-)