Tomato Sauce

I am so glad I had stocked my freezer before E arrived (with Giz's help and the help of a friend).  I try to be productive during the day, but between our outings (necessary for maintaining my sanity), nursing and E's strong preference for being held (read: tendency to cry her head off when she isn't being held), it can be challenging to get much done.  Particularly chores that can't be dropped part way through.

(I can never get enough of these "ugly cry" pictures)

Thankfully, my cousin has been in town for the past week and a half.  I told her that, aside from the whole "husband-sharing" thing, I thinking having a sister-wife would be great.  With her love of babies, she happily entertained E while I made tomato sauce using up the tomatoes from our garden.

I blanched the plum tomatoes to get skin off.   

Then I diced the tomatoes, along with garlic and shallots.  I brought the tomatoes to a boil and let it boil down for about 45 minutes.

Since I didn't have enough tomatoes to make it worth canning, I went ahead and prepared sauce with other ingredients like roasted red pepper (finally finishing off the 1.5L jar that Giz felt we needed in our fridge), artichokes, herbs and chilli peppers.  This is the base of many of our pasta sauces.  

I then froze the sauce ( I just need to remember to add a bit of sugar when I warm up the sauce because it's a bit on the acidic side).

There's something so satisfying about growing the food yourself and making it from scratch.  Here's what we started with:

Part way through the season:

Strawberry Sauce

A couple of weeks ago, R and I picked about 4 litres of strawberries.  My trusty kitchen stool came in handy for picking since getting up and down is a bit challenging at this point in the pregnancy.  After freezing 3 large freezer bags full, eating a bunch and making some sugar-free jam, I had about 6-7 cups of strawberries left.  

I knew I wanted to make a preserve out of it, but I didn't want to make more jam and also didn't want something that had mounds of sugar.  So, I was really happy to find this recipe on fellow Ottawan's food blog, If Music Be the Food of Love, Play On.  

This recipe comes from Pat Crocker's Preserving book.

Strawberry Sauce

4 cups mashed or blendered strawberries that are well-ripe-to-overripe
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 packed brown sugar
grated rind and juice of one lemon
1 tablespoon fancy molasses
1 tablespoon raspberry wine vinegar (can use balsamic vinegar)

Prepare your jars in a hot water bath to sanitize them (picture below is after I raised the jars from the hot water).

Hull and clean strawberries

You'll want about 6 cups worth of strawberries..

To get 4 cups of crushed strawberries

I basically put all of the ingredients in around the same time.  But opted to add the sugars first and add the other components when it that came to a boil.

Let boil for about 10-15 minutes (length of boiling will determine thickness of sauce and amount of sauce that you're left with).

Jar sauce (as per normal preserving instructions) and boil in a hot water bath for 10-15 minutes.  Let jars cool overnight and check seal.   

I'm also adding this recipe to recipes.ca, a new cooking community that celebrates Canadian food writers, culinary professionals, and of course, Canadian cuisine. 

Preserving Tomato Sauce

In my last post, I talked about some lessons learned related to growing tomatoes.  But, I think I left out the biggest lesson learned:  grow plum tomatoes!

Plum tomatoes are used in so many recipes that it is easy to find ways to use them up.  Not to mention that I spent quite a while trying to figure out where to buy a bushel of plum tomatoes, including contacting local farmers, Loblaws and Farmboy. Some of the prices are a bit hard to take, knowing that Giz is able to find a bushel for $20 in Toronto. In the end, I went with the 1/2 bushels sold at Parkdale market for $15.

On our first tomato day, Ron (whom I've mentioned before, here) set out to can tomato sauce.  We started by washing and coring the tomatoes.

Next, we scored the tomatoes by making an "X" shape at one end of the tomatoes and blanched the tomatoes to peel them.

We had enough to make a double recipe of this tomato sauce:

Seasoned Tomato Sauce

Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving

12 cups chopped ripe plum tomatoes (about 6 lb/3kg), unpeeled

1 cup chopped onion

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 tbsp chopped fresh oregano or 1 tsp dried

1 tsp granulated sugar

1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper

2 bay leaves

2 tbsp red wine vinegar or lemon juice

1/2 tsp pickling salt

1. Combine tomatoes, onion, garlic, oregano, sugar, pepper and bay leaves in a large stainless steel or enamel saucepan.  Bring to a boil over high heat, reduce heat and boil gently, uncovered, stirring occasionally, for 1.25 hours of until very thick (note: you can determine your preferred level of thickness).

Press through a food mill or coarse sieve; remove and discard seeds and skins.  (Note: I didn't do this because I wanted a diced tomato texture and had already removed the skins via blanching).   Add vinegar and salt to pulp.    

2. Prepare jars in water canner (I let my jars sit in a rolling boil for about 20 minutes).  Remove hot jars from canner and ladle sauce into jars to within 1/2 inch (1 cm) of rim (headspace).  After reading about tomato sauce separating here, I was careful about only removing jars one at a time and then replacing the filled jar to the water canner while filling the remaining jars.  Process for 35 minutes for half-pints (250mL) and pint (500 mL) jars.

Makes about 7 cups (1.75 L).  I got about 6- one litre jars from a double recipe.

Note: the above picture was taken the day after I canned the sauce.  When the jars have cooled and the lids have sealed, I removed the rings.

Since making these 6 litres, I made another double recipe with a separate half bushel.  Then, I went to a friend's place and showed her how to make tomato sauce.

I made the tomato sauce in September and I've since used a couple of jars. The flavour is great and it is quite a treat to have sauce on hand that is home-made.  Next year, I plan to make more so that I don't have to eat it sparingly to ensure that it lasts the winter.

Chive Pesto

I think I need to plant more perennials.  I loved having chives growing without having to expend any energy.  Not to mention that they grew better than the plants that I worked hard to grow!

The thing is, I don't tend to use chives in many of my dishes.  So, I decided to expand my pesto collection and make some chive pesto.

I started out by separating the flowers from the rest of the chives.  

I like using the flowers (they're edible) as a garnish or in a vase, for decoration.

I found a recipe for chive pesto at this link 

Chive Pesto Recipe

2 cups roughly chopped chives

1/4 cup olive oil

1/3 cup toasted nuts: almonds, pine nuts, walnuts, etc.

1-3 ounces or 1/3 cup more or less parmesan cheese

1 clove or less of garlic

Blend it in a food processor until fairly chopped up but still smallish chunks.  Note: I blended it until pretty close to smooth.  

I ended up having enough ingredients for a double recipe, which filled up two ice cube trays.

Here's my pesto collection: 3 bags of scape pesto, 1 bag of chive pesto and 1/2 bag of basil pesto.  Each pesto has its own distinct flavour and I'm looking forward to try them in the months to come.