TOMATOES! Sunday, September 19

Roy and Jayne Toma have offered their spacious kitchen, just a couple hundred yards from Catherine Store, for canning tomatoes on a Sunday afternoon when we can get the ripe tomatoes.  David Bedford and I have inquired about availability of ripe organic tomatoes from Paonia/Hotchkiss, and found that we can get as many pounds of ripe tomos as we want, around Thursday, September 16.  If you're wondering what you can preserve with tomatoes beside spaghetti sauce, check out the chutney, salsa, soups, even catsup recipes at: http://www.canning-recipes.com/  Please calculate how many pounds of tomatoes you'll want, so we can order them all at once.  We'll need to know your quantities by Monday evening, September 13, so we can give our farmer time to harvest them for delivery to Basalt on Thursday.  I calculate that 2-pounds of tomatoes will fill a 1-quart jar, whole, diced or pureed.  Making sauce with lots of other ingredients, you may end up with as little as 1.5 pounds of tomatoes per finished quart.

We will receive the tomatoes in Basalt on Thursday, September 16.  We'll ask everyone to make their tomato sauce or other recipe, or pre-peel their tomatoes to be canned whole before Sunday, and arrive at the canning workshop with a pot full of your recipe, and the jars and lids you'll need for canning it.  There will be a gas stove in the kitchen where you can re-heat your recipe, and a large pot of boiling water on the patio outside, for sterilizing your jars and curing them after filling and sealing.

We'll begin the canning operations at 1:00 pm, and plan to finish by 5:00.

I just opened a jar of tomatoes I pureed and canned in the Autumn of 2009, and blended the contents with a bit of lemon and salt to make a delicious tomato juice.  Makes me anxious to can the new crop for next year!

MT