Spicy

Well on Tuesday I picked 18lbs of tomatoes. It is no where near Granny's 80lbs, but for me I'm happy enough not to have to deal with processing 80lbs of tomatoes. In addition I pulled out and harvested my tomatillos so I had a lot of those. I wanted to wait until it got cooler on the weekend, but some of the tomatoes were getting soft as where some of the older tomatillos. So it was salsa time.

It took all day to process both kinds of salsa. I love how the tomatillos get sudsy when they are washed, though I hate their sticky texture. They are so easy to make salsa with as I just chop them up in the food processor. The only hard part about that salsa is peeling a million tomatillos. Well chopping up all the onions and peppers is time consuming too. The onions were store bought, but the peppers were harvested this week from the garden. I used a lot of serranos to make the salsas spicier.

Tomato salsa is harder than the tomatillo salsa as I have to peel and squeeze out all the guts. Though there is an advantage to this. I use the guts to make tomato juice. I let all the guts sit in a strainer while I'm doing the rest and they drain right out. I only had a three jars of tomato juice as I mostly used paste tomatoes and they have very little guts and juice. And I made a nasty mistake with them. I forgot to add the citric acid. Tomatoes aren't acidic enough to can plain. The salsa recipes have lime juice and vinegar to make them acidic enough, but not the tomato juice. So this morning I was up and reprocessing those three jars again. Usually I'm really careful to make sure the right amount gets into the jars, but since I was doing salsa I wasn't thinking about it.

Yesterday's bounty: 8 pints of Annie's Salsa, 7 pints of Salsa Verde, and 3 pints of tomato juice. I used one and a half cases of my pint jars. I will need to buy more before the main apple season hits or I won't have enough for applesauce. And while I'm at it I really need some more half pint jars. I wouldn't mind a few smaller cans of tomato sauce. Hmm and I need an ice tray. I used to use the ones from my old fridge, but my new one has an ice maker. I often freeze some small batches of tomato sauce for even smaller uses. You never know when you need just a couple of tablespoons and I hate opening a big jar just for a little bit.

Now I think I'll take the weekend off from processing tomatoes. My counter is almost empty. If only I could keep myself away from the tomato plants for a couple of days I can keep it that way. But the odds are slim.