Today I was asked by our Master Gardener to put my tomato preserves in her booth at the Warner (NH) Fall Foliage Festival in October! I have made 20 1/2 pints so far. I still have Sweet 100 tomatoes coming in and they make the best tomato preserves.
I Discover an awesome recipe for Roasted Tomato Passata (pg 165) in “The River Cottage Preserving Handbook” by Pam Corbin-2008 . It is easy and delicious ,but you need to puree the roasted vegetables and you don’t want to have to worry about skins or seed . I use a Stainless steel Foley food mill and if you don’t own a Foley Food Mill , You Should! A Foley food mill is so useful, you can use it for apple sauce , tomato sauce, taking braised vegetables and put them through the mill to make a gravy for any type of meat or help thicken a soup. I don’t have a food processor but I have a blender and a Foley food mill and that is enough!
I froze 3 trays of sliced peppers(yellow, red and green)and put both red and yellow onions in the attic to dry and then they will go in our back room (which is around 50 degrees in the winter). I also have sweet onions and shallots to use in the next couple of weeks for salsa, pear relish (this is a ball recipe 1990 edition pg.32) and more roasted tomato sauce. A suggestion to find the 1990 edition of the ball book was at the local public library.
I took 5 lbs of tomatoes from the freezer to roast tomorrow evening! Hopefully I will have time to roast them when I get home from work!
I checked the pear tree in our side yard and there are lots of pears but they are not quite ready yet, maybe another week. The pear relish recipe is designed to use firm pears and I found it worked best if they weren’t quite ripe. Remember pears don’t ripen on the tree, you pick them (hopefully before the sheep get them) and put them in a cool place in a box or big paper shopping bag. Make sure you check them every day, they sometimes ripen quicker than you think. If you see fruit flies they are too ripe for pear relish.
Happy Canning!
Kudos
