Ter May Toze

I mentioned a few days ago that we had gotten ten ponds of organic heirloom tomatoes.

I ordered them knowing that I'd be canning jam that day. That gave me a couple of days to plan my attack on them! We got a ten pound box of these heirlooms from Bountiful baskets. After making jam I wanted to move on to something bigger: tomatoes!

My friend Sam came over since she has been interested in learning how to can like me. I picked up some Roma tomatoes to make our output a little bigger.

It's a lot easier to do this than I thought. Yes, it's time consuming, and a bit messy, but it's not bad. I used pint sized jars because they were closer in size to the cans for which many recipes call. We did jars of just Romas and then jars of the Heirlooms. I'm a big dummy though and had the jars boiling away when I realized that I forgot to add the lemon juice to them. They need that acid to balance out things and keep it safe!

A little internet research revealed that I could reprocess them within 24 hours, so I dumped them all out into a large pot, brought them back to a boil, and repacked them into hot, freshly washed jars with new lids. Then it was back into the processing pot for an hour and a half. I did lose two jars worth of tomatoes because of all the extra cooking, but that's okay. I'm just glad I didn't have to lose SEVEN jars due to that error.

While we were waiting for the processing, I baked. The first batch of tomatoes had me making Pumpkin Apple Bread from the Seattle Junior league cookbook. The second caused me to turn out Pioneer Woman's Blackberry "Cobbler"

Go ahead and add in the fact that we had dinner, my kitchen is completely trashed. I love you husband!