Tomato fever

It's been a long time since we've posted to the "cooking" portion of the site. Frankly, we cook all the time. We cook so much that it almost feels ridiculous to post to the cooking section, because cooking has ceased being special for us.

The fact that we cook every day, or nearly every day, is actually pretty special on its own -- but if we posted about that with any diligence, this would cease to be a house blog and would be just a blog about what we're cooking every day.

However, in the past few days an abundance of tomatoes has led us to a cooking arena which is off our normal routine. We broke out the hot water bath canner (and a trusty canning/preserving cookbook) and put up some tomatoes.

We actually had buckets and buckets of tomatoes. Here are some of them, including heirlooms. We also had tons of plum tomatoes:

After we cooked down the most ripe ones, Evan put them through the food mill. We then cooked that sauce some more:

Then we ladled them in quart jars with 2 tbsp of lemon juice apiece. We ended up with five quart jars, which we put in the canner for 35 minutes. Here they are before I lowered the canning rack into the canner for processing:

I burned myself a couple times on hot water. And the kitchen got very hot. We actually did the cooking and canning at night, which was good because the temperature was lower overall, so it only got to like 90 in the kitchen.

After they'd processed in boiling water for 35 minutes, I let them sit in the canner for another five minutes, then extracted them from their steaming bath so they could sit quietly overnight. Voila!