Dehydrating Tomatoes!

It all starts with a whole lot of cherry tomatoes and not enough people in the house to eat them :)  In all honesty, I'm the only one who eats them : /

Washed, dried and sliced in half, they get arranged on a borrowed dehydrator. (Thanks Amelia!)

Layer after layer...

5 layers in all

In to the dry sauna they all go!

So here's what they look like and there is still 4 hours left to dehydrate! 22 hours in all! I don't know if a bigger dehydrator would be quicker or not but if I like these, I'll need to investigate that. I had a recommendation from a friend of an Excalibur brand with like 9 trays.

9 trays would have been better because this is what was leftover. Apparently I need a bigger dehydrator considering this is just one picking from three different plants. Hmmm... we'll see. It takes a horribly long time and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them all. I got this idea from a friend who is a crafting, baking and writing guru named Lynda Heines over at Bloom Bake & Create. Lynda's got all kinds of creative ideas to check out.


If anyone has experience with dehydrating, I'd love to hear any tips or suggestions you have.


Enjoy your Friday!

It's Bean-Time!

Man a year goes by fast! It just seems like yesterday I was pickin' and a snappin'. Beans that is. Yesterday we had absolutely gorgeous weather with the temperature reaching only 84 degrees F but I unfortunately didn't get to enjoy much of it. Besides sitting on the deck snapping beans, I was inside canning. Two batches equalling 13 quarts. Canner takes 7 quarts at once but one was for eatin'. Canning one batch takes about 2 hours counting cooking the beans (hot pack), filling the jars, getting them in the canner, processing and finally the cool down to get them out of the canner. Actual processing time is just 25 minutes for quarts.


Even Asher helped with the snappin'. Of course we had to go in and investigate his beans or we might end up eating who knows what. We used bush beans, Kentucky Wonder this year.

These beans are out of our garden even though you see the Walmart bags. Once our buckets get full, we put them in the bags so we can keep picking using our bowls and buckets which are easy to spray with the hose to clean the garden dirt off.

This is a pretty good size sink, the best way to wash them in my opinion. Swirl the beans around then dunk a strainer in to fish them out then spray with water again. Easy peasy.

So here's the fruit of our labor. My labor. I was the only one canning. No one even came in for a drink while I was doing this... hmmm. I only had two casualties. Two jars fell from my counter with a crash and glass went everywhere. Good thing I guess the little fella wasn't under foot.


If you've never canned before, it's actually way less scarier than it sounds. Just get yourself a large canner, jars lids and bands, a jar puller outer thingy (technical name) and canning salt. You can either buy the fresh beans or grow them. Easy and very gratifying. I've got an awesome salsa recipe that you can can here.


Hopefully this is the first of bunches of more jars for the winter. We eat a lot of beans around here. It's just about the only green thing my kid will eat. We've got high temps of 105 Thursday, 106 Friday and Saturday! Thank God I won't be pickin' beans ;) at least for another week or so. Good water time temps.


Catch ya later,

Hamburger Stew for a cold winter's night

I've got a recipe to share today and it's perfect for this time of year. With all the big dinner's going on and family over but you still gotta make your normal every day dinners, this is great to have around in the fridge. It just gets better in the fridge as a matter of fact. It's also one of those recipes that you can add or delete whatever you have on hand. It's filling and warm good comfort food. I hope you enjoy it :)


Hamburger Stew

• 2 big cans of whole tomatoes
• potatoes as many as you want
• carrots about 2 lbs.
• onion
• garlic
• hamburger, about 2 pounds
• tomato sauces (according to how much you want to make, i.e. how soupy. Sometimes I use a big can of spaghetti sauce)
• sweet basil
• oregano
• salt + pepper

So the first thing I do is get a big pot and get my sauces and tomatoes simmering with the spices in it. This way they get all yummy and flavorful. The longer it simmers the better. 

Side note: This is perfect for my tomatoes that I've frozen from my garden. If you've never done this, it is sooooo much easier than canning. Just toss your washed and cored smaller tomatoes like roma type in freezer bags and freeze those suckers solid. No blanching, no peeling. When you pull them out of the freezer to use, the skins slide right off as they thaw. Great for sauces, soups and chili's.

I then peel my carrots and cut them up in 1" bites and pop them in my micro cooker with a little water to steam them in the microwave. I like my carrots real soft, so I do this instead of just letting them cook in the sauce.

I'm usually in a hurry, so I cut up my potatoes and usually cook them up in my pressure cooker which takes like 3 minutes. I should probably just toss my carrots in there too. You could also just cook them on the stove or microwave.

Then I fry up my burger with the onion and garlic. Drain the grease and add to stew. Let it simmer. You really could serve it up right then, but I like to let all the flavors come together. Serve it up with some butter bread and there you go. Like I said, it is even better the next day.


Let me know if you try it :)

Live and Learn part 3,891 or Homemade Canned Tomato Sauce Hell

They say if you can't be a good example then you'll just have to be a horrible warning. So... I'm sharing my experience with dun, dun dunnnnn.... canning homemade tomato sauce.

Oh the visions I had of jars and jars and jars of a thick, rich, complex, yummy homemade better than anything you could ever buy canned tomato sauce from the fruit of my efforts in my veggie garden. What I've ended up with after using 35 pounds of my fresh from the garden tomatoes was three and three quarter quart jars of possibly the longest, exhausting most expensive cooking process ever.

my 1st big pick of the season

blanching

peeling

 First offense, I used my primo tomatoes for this project which happened to be from my first of the season big bumper crop, which are always the tastiest you know. Okay, I did devour a few with salt and pepper before the long torturous adventure but we wont' count them cause I had to share them with my family. Picked fresh the evening prior to said slave labor.

After hours of washing, blanching and peeling all these beauties I then had to core and get the seeds and juice out of every single tomato. A totally thankless job and time consuming beyond belief. You would think there would be some easier way to do this, maybe there is but I'm unaware of it so I did it all with a paring knife and my fingers. I honestly don't know how anyone would do this more than once in their lifetime. Maybe that's why Ragu is a huge and profitable company.

I started this project at four in the afternoon. First mistake. Second mistake - I did it by myself. Had I known, I would've had a friend over to help. Preferably one that hates tomato sauce so I wouldn't have to share.

Slaving away for hours it is now about 11:00 pm and I've finally got every tomato peeled, seeded and juiced and in the biggest pot I own besides my big canner. I follow the directions from many websites that tell me to now reduce my tomatoes by one third for a thin sauce and by half for a thick sauce.  Easy peasy I'm thinking after all this neck straining feet killing work.

skinned

They didn't say anything about the tomatoes burning to the bottom of the pot! Oh son of a @!*%! Well so now I'm trying to regulate my now fire roasted tomatoes (a.k.a. burnt) into a gentle simmer... three and a half hours later (yes, that's what I said... 3 and a half) it has only reduced by like 1/8th. Ugh... I'm going cross-eyed with exhaustion and trying to pull out the little burnt flecks floating around. So I decide that sleep will win out and I take the whole thing and put it in the refrigerator and finish Tuesday. No telling what that will do to my end result of now a smoky-ish sauce. Jeesh... but I'm not giving up dammit.

I drag myself out of bed at 9:30 and pull the pot out of the fridge and get it back on the burner. It wasn't even cold to the touch. It probably spoiled everything in my refrigerator, too. So back to simmering. I finally felt it was reduced enough by 1:30 in the afternoon (!). That is seven hours folks. Besides it probably not having any nutrients left in it at all, I probably will have an electric bill out of this world.

reduced - finally!

Excitedly, I have my jars ready and start ladling the sauce in and start to realize that there is no way this will make 7 quarts like the directions said it would. I manage to scrape out three and three quarter jars out of the pot and start canning. They are still in the canner as I write this and it is 3:30 pm.

filling up a whopping 3 3/4 jars

lonely tomato sauce

The number one thing I've learned from this expedition is that unless someone has some magical formula to reduce time by like 100 times, this is my first and last time I will ever make canned tomato sauce. I don't care if it turns out to be the best dang tomato sauce I've ever tasted. Liquid gold, texas tea. Nope, that's it. Never again. Chocked up to be yet another lesson learned. Did I mention that my husband hates spaghetti?

Homemade & Canned Tomato Sauce - my final cost = probably about $50 a jar