Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Preserving the Fresh Taste of Summer Harvest

row of several varieties of tomatoes
I don't have an extremely large garden, but it doesn't take many plants to suddenly find yourself inundated with more produce than you can eat or give away. Part of the beauty of gardening is growing enough so that, with a little time and effort, you can still enjoy the harvest into the winter. I planted 7 different varieties of tomato this year, one plant of each type: Celebrity, Sweet 100, Amish Paste, Hawaiian, Black Prince, Juliet, and Oxtail. The Hawaiian must have been mis-labeled at the nursery because it should have produced a large golden beefsteak type tomato. My "Hawaiian" is producing very small (just over pea size) red tomatoes.


Juliet tomatoes
By far, the most prolific plant has been the Juliet, followed closely by the Sweet 100. The Juliet is a mini-roma type of tomato. The foliage is so luxuriant and dense, it's kind of like hunting for Easter eggs when you're tying to pick all the fruit on the interior of the plant. I forgot to take a picture of my big bowl of Juliets that I used for making tomato sauce.


juicing the tomatoes
I put the tomatoes through the juicer, which was very easy...no need to peel or slice. The little Juliets were just the right size to drop into the feed tube. Nothing is wasted since the skin, seeds, etc will go into the compost pile to enrich the soil.


strained tomato juice
The juicer leaves a few seeds, so a simple run through the strainer gives a nice clean, smooth sauce. The clear bowl on the left in the background contains two Celebrity tomatoes and one Amish Paste tomato. The clear bowl on the right contains mostly Sweet 100's and a few unripe Juliets on top that I accidentally knocked off of the plant when I was picking.


cooking down the sauce
I cooked the sauce down to about 1/3 of its original volume to give a nice semi-thick sauce. Then I poured the sauce into sterilized 4-ounce jars along with some lemon juice (1/2 T per jar) and processed in a covered boiling water bath for 35 minutes.



I used small jars on this run because I want to have small sizes to use on homemade pizzas. Plus, my husband and I are empty nesters now, and don't go through the large volumes of food as we did when the children were at home. Next run I'll probably can somewhat larger jars for use in spaghetti sauce, marinara sauce, etc.


zucchini and yellow squash patch
I am amazed at how dense the foliage is on my squash/zucchini patch this year.  I check for squash and zucchini almost every day because they are more tender and tasty when small. Plus, a zucchini can grow to baseball bat size before you know it!

fresh zucchini


shredded zucchini

The shredding blade for my food processor is broken, so I just hand shredded these zucchini. It was pretty easy to do since the zucchini are nice and tender.


shredded zucchini ready for the freezer

I packed 2 cups of shredded zucchini into each freezer bag for future use in zucchini bread, zucchini chocolate cake, meat loaf, soups, stews, etc. I labeled the bags with the date and contents, including the measurement.

All in all, it was a fun and productive day!




3 comments:

  1. You blogged about two of my favourites Janice: Tomatoes and Zucchini(we call them courgettes in England) I haven't been successful growing them and give up my battle with slugs and snails.
    What a nifty idea to put your tomatoes through the juicer, I shall remember to do that myself.

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    1. Thanks for stopping by, Annie. We usually don't have snails, but the squash and zucchini plants sometimes succumb to squash vine borers. If that happens, I'm usually tired of squash by that time, so just move on to planting some other crop.
      I purchased a juicer earlier this year so I could have freshly juiced fruits and veggies to drink. It worked beautifully for preparing the tomatoes. The feed tube is fairly narrow, so I would need to slice larger roma tomatoes in half, but still very easy indeed.

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