Tomatoes

Today is my 8th wedding anniversary.  Wanna know what I did on my anniversary?  I did laundry and canned tomatoes.  So romantic.

My dad came over and let my kids help him plant a cherry tomato plant and a regular tomato plant in our back yard a couple months ago.  We have to water them every single day.  The plants have struggled in the 100+ degree days we've been having, but they have survived.

For a couple weeks now we have been collecting the red tomatoes everyday, mostly cherry tomatoes.  The problem is that Jared and I are the only people in our family who like tomatoes.  So we have been able to just incorporate tomatoes into our meals in order to use up what we have.

However, the last week or so has brought more tomatoes than we could possibly eat.  Can you relate?  Well, if you are also growing tomatoes and drowning in more than you can eat, you may be interested to hear what I did with mine.

First, I brought a pot of water to a boil.  I also filled a large bowl with cold water.  You should add ice to this cold water.  Unfortunately, we don't have an ice maker, so we rarely have ice.  But I did look in our freezer and found two large cooler ice packs.  They did the trick!

{Sidenote: This reminds me of a funny scene from the show "Mad About You."  A convenience store owner says, "Ice is our biggest profit margin.  It's just water and cold and time."  Anyone else ever watch "Mad About You"?}

I made very shallow "x" cuts on the bottoms of the large tomatoes, trying to just pierce the skin.

I placed the tomatoes in the boiling water for about 30 seconds, or until the skin started peeling away from the score lines.

Then I put the tomatoes into the "ice" water.  I let them sit in the cold water for several minutes.  In the meantime, I began the tedious task of scoring the bottoms of all the cherry tomatoes.

I did the same process with the cherry tomatoes, but they only needed to stay in the boiling water for about 10 seconds.

Once the tomatoes were cooled in the cold water, I pulled them out and easily peeled the skins off the tomatoes. 

Once I got all the skins off the large tomatoes, I chopped them and placed them in jars.  Once I got all the skins off the cherry tomatoes, I decided to try to just cut off the tiny spots where the stems had been.  Not easy.  I ended up accidentally squeezing many of the tomatoes.  It was easiest to cut off the very tops of the cherry tomatoes.

I also had four large tomatoes that had weird spots or splits on their skin, so I just cut out the bad spots and chopped the rest of the tomato with the skins on.  I don't mind tomato skins when I eat them raw, but I prefer not to have skins on when they're cooked.  I'm sure I can find uses for all these forms of tomatoes.

I ended up with two jars of skinless chopped large tomatoes, one jar of skinless whole cherry tomatoes, and two jars (one 1-pint and one 1/2-pint) of chopped tomatoes with skins on.

I had these (and more) canning jars on hand because that's just the kind of girl I am.  The wide-mouth half-pint jar is left over from one of the most successful homemade Christmas gifts I've ever made.  I'll tell you more about that another time.

I also had these adorable strawberry jar labels on hand:

I slapped the labels on the jars and put them in my deep freeze.  We can use these tomatoes later in casseroles, chili, or whatever.  I love that none of our homegrown tomatoes went to waste!

And really, the whole point is that these tomatoes are proof that I kept a plant alive!  (see Random Fact #18)

I hope this helps any of you wondering how to preserve all your tomatoes.  I know there are lots of ways to can tomatoes, and this is just how I did it.

Now when I pull them out of the freezer in a few months, I hope that the labels make me happy and not bitter that I spent my anniversary canning tomatoes.

Jessica

P.S.  Here are a few pictures from our wedding album:

And here we are 8 years later: