On a previous post, my daughter, Elise, posted about our making tomato sauce and tomato juice.
I turned all of the tomato sauce into marinara sauce which we use on pasta or pizza or to dip homemade cheese sticks in.
It turned out yummy.
The only problem with making tomato sauce is that it takes a lot of tomatoes, and I mean a lot, to make it.
Since not all the tomatoes ripened at the same time, I ended up freezing the sauce until I had at least enough for a canner full which is 7 quarts.
The upside to the way I made the sauce (see previous post) produced a lot of tomato juice, which I use for soups.
I couldn't tell you how many tomatoes it took. I didn't keep track.
But other than eating some fresh, they produced 51 quarts of juice and only 15 1/2 quarts of sauce.
We use a lot of sauce, so that isn't even a drop in the bucket. So I will still have to buy from the store.
For us though, the sauce was well worth all the tomatoes it took.
The recipe I used called for:
56 oz crushed tomatoes
1 TBL olive oil
8 garlic cloves, thinly sliced.
saute garlic in the oil then add:
4 fresh basil leaves, torn into small pieces.
2 tsp salt
I used a lot of garlic and along with what fresh basil I had on hand from the garden, I added a lot more dried basil.
I also used some oregano and added garlic powder.
In other words, I made it according to taste.
On another note, I had ordered some rice, beans, oats, and rice flour in bulk and was trying to figure out how I was going to store it.
I came up with the idea to use quart jars of which I have an abundance, and plastic juice bottles which I had been saving.
I also save canning lids from opened jars. I don't reuse them in the canning process but I do use them for projects like this or putting leftovers in jars in the fridge.
I put the rice flour and some of the oats in quart jars and the rice and beans in the plastic juice bottles.
The rest of the oats went into ziplock bags.
I put an oxygen absorber packet in each jar and bottle.
I also put a couple of oxygen absorbers in each ziplock bag and put the bags in totes with air tight lids.
Then how to store all those jars? I came up with the idea to place some of the quart jars on top of my cupboards and then cover them with a pretty piece of cloth matching my kitchen. The rest went into boxes and into the pantry.
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