Tomato sauce and chutney

Right now my kitchen stove is splattered with everything you can think of and my kitchen has been continuously a mess.I've done a lot of caning in the past week. Today I'm working on tomato sauce and chutney from all of those tomatoes I chopped yesterday.

The sauce (top pot in photo) is just a vegetarian spaghetti sauce, which will get frozen in meal sized portions. The bottom pot is tomato chutney. I made a very successful peach chutney over the weekend and I thought I'd try it with tomatoes. Well, it isn't done yet, but so far, so good. Both of these look a little watery in this photo but that was soon remedied by plenty of cooking down.

Peaches and tomatos

Well, another weekend, another 1/2 bushel of tomatoes. I also have peaches. Needless to say, I spent a good many hours blanching, peeling, slicing and chopping.

Tomato Jam

I've had a craving to make tomato jam for about a month ago. It all started when I read a blog entry by the Amateur Gourmet where he casually mentioned eating tomato jam on a sandwich. I wondered what this would taste like-- I envisioned some sort of savory tomato spread. I began researching this and today I decided to try this recipe from Food in Jars.

I have to say, it is not bad, but then it is not so good that I want to eat it all. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the 5 or 6 jars I ended up with, except palm some off to adventurous eaters. It is terribly sweet and tastes more like a sweet and spicy ketchup. I just labeled it "ketchup" and stuck it on my shelf until I can figure out what to do with it.

Tomatoes!!

Over the weekend picked up a 1/2 a bushel of #2 grade tomatoes from a local farm stand. There was nothing wrong with them except that they were cracked from growing too quickly. I decided that they should all go into the freezer for soup and chili. I spent a good part of the day peeling, dicing and packing them into freezer bags in recipe sized quantities. I'm happy because these have no salt, unlike canned tomatoes.