Overnight those tomatoes shed a lot of water. One bucket had about five inches of yellow-tinged water but the other had only about a quarter of that. The first one had tomatoes that had been frozen and the other had tomatoes that we had freshly picked. Freezing must break down the tissues so they shed water better. Mental note — freeze tomatoes before hanging.
After dumping the tomatoes in my big stock pot, we brought it up to a boil. My stock pot is thinner than it should be and food scorches easily. To save myself stirring constantly, I put the pot in a water bath using my big canner. It worked. Stirring every 10-15 minutes was sufficient. After the tomatoes cooked down, I pulled about half out and ran it through a food mill, getting rid of lots of seeds and some hard spots.
In the end, even with draining all that fluid, the sauce simmered for nine hours to reduce by half, giving us seven quarts of rich, beautiful sauce, just right for spaghetti or pizza. But my conscience is nagged by running our electric stove so long.
We emptied out the big onion patch. With four of us pulling, it went pretty fast. The books say to dry them in the sun for a week or two before putting them in long term storage, so we dumped them out on the patio table. It looks pretty impressive to me. The book also says that the ones that still have green tops won't keep well, so we'll separate those out and use them first.
The days are shortening and shade has encroached on the patio from the big walnut trees in the south. The change in the light takes me back to this time last year. I wasn't nearly as busy, but I dreamed of this work. We had spent the summer reclaiming the pasture and garden from the weeds and by this time we had worked up to bare dirt. Although living in town, we were doing the work of homesteading. One short year later, God is feeding us abundantly with a heavy garden, milk, and meat and educating us in things that were common knowledge a century ago.
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