And I forgot to mention that I'm going to be taking a bushel's of ripening ones with me on vacation to can while I'm at the beach! That's if I don't pelt them into the ocean in frustration instead!

Emily

Emily, they do taste so much better. The store ones are hard in texture and not as sweet.
I know, canning is not always convenient, but worth it. Could you freeze some for later ?
Hope you have a nice vacation. You may really feel you need one after tonight. You do seem a bit frustrated.
I love the beach, too.

Emily, I agree with Linda Lou. There's no comparison to a home grown tomato. I too planted lots of tomatoes and have them everywhere. They're canned, frozen and on the counter with still more to come! In January, when everything is white and will be for months, you will definately appreciate your efforts. Throw those tomatoes in the freezer and enjoy your vacation.

Drop 'em off at my house; I'll take them off your hands! (I seem to recall that you used to be in RI, so I'm guessing you might be heading my way!) No canning on vacation!

Emily, it's so hard to take a vacation from the garden. Next year maybe you could get a neighbor to tend it, water if necessary, and in exchange use what ripens while you're gone. Or maybe a volunteer from a food bank, if you find one that can use fresh food.

Enjoy your trip! If you don't get to canning them, share them with everyone you meet on vacation who will surely love a home grown tomato to break up a week of eating out.

Melissa

I always feel the same way when I get started on tomatoes too! In the end, the results are worth it! I agree with mom2....no canning on vacation! Hope you have a great one!

Plan an earlier vacation, or one thats later in October.. They do taste better when home grown, only because they are strains we grow to maturity, and are truely ripe when WE hand pick them. Also, most canned tomatoes you buy are in metal cans, and have a metallic taste. If you do see glass jars of tomatoes, they tend to be sweetened with sugar. The other option is to find commercally canned tomatoes packed in paper cartons (Pome brand?) as these are treated with type of safe radiation to kill off bacteria, like you see in paper cartons of milk that are on the regular store shelves. If you need speed and like smooth tomato sauces, use that infmaous Villaware food strainer as it can handle quite a big batch of tomatoes in no time at all.

Em, if it helps at all, I have 4 bushels of tomatoes on my back porch right now. They are on the deck rails, on the picnic table, on the porch swing, spread out everywhere to reach optimum ripeness for canning. LOL It looks like "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" in my backyard.

I'll be starting tomorrow night after work, stewed tomatoes for chili, then some salsa, some catsup (the only "tomato product" that the VillaWare/Squeezo is used for here), maybe some spaghetti sauce. Oh, and KatieC's roasted tomato and garlic soup. Yum.

I do agree that there should be no canning on vacation unless you WANT to, though. I take vacation days from work to can, but I'm odd that way, I really LIKE to can.

Annie

Hopefully fearless Emily is asleep by now, but my sympathies. If she's like me, her freezers are too full to put the tomatoes in. Hubby and I do plan vacations to interfere with gardening and canning as little as possible. One summer we were gone for a long time, and asked the local police to watch our house. They told us that when people are gone so long they walk around the house every day. So we told them to go and pick things from the garden while we were gone, since they were walking around anyway. When we came home and called to let them know we were back, the person who answered the phone said, "Oh, you're the ones with the tomatoes." The police were eating our tomatoes while we were gone, how is that for a creative way to get rid of them?

I 'cheat' on my tomato sauce, and don't skin most of my tomatoes, and take most but not all of the seeds out. Really has never bothered us, that makes it a little faster anyway.

Marcia, up late waiting for the peaches in the BWB

em, next year, come on up here for Labour Day and we'll do our tomatoes together! I enjoy 'em --- I have indeterminate plants, though, that produce over a long season, so I do it in many smaller batches through August & Setpember rather than a huge bushel marathon.

I enjoy making sauce a lot more since I got a food mill (just a cheap second-hand one at Goodwill) so I don't peel any more, but run them through the mill once they're sofetened --- and, as I've mentioned, I scoop out a lot of juice early on, too, so it doesn't take forever to thicken.

Still peel 'em for crushed tomatoes and for salsa, however. I never bother to seed --- the seeds don't bother me at all, and I hate losing all that nice tomatoey stuff around them!

But yes, they really really really are better than store bought, at least, than mass-canned store-bought. Probably you can get (especially in Ithaca) an organic, small-company variety that is a bit improvement on Aylmer or whatever....

Zabby

I'd just toss 'em in the freezer and deal with them later!
I'm kinda lazy that way sometimes.
Imagine, though, tomato sauce cooking down or Roasted Tomato Garlic soup in November, or December!

Mmmmm...the smell, the warmth.....
Bread rising on the stove top to pop in after roasting the 'maters.......and dinner's ready!

Yep, it's beginning to feel like fall.

I do the same with berries. Making strawberry jam in January is awesome! And I don't have to stand in 80 degree heat to make it in June.

Deanna

Deanna (or others),

You say I'd just toss 'em in the freezer and deal with them later! Do you toss 'em in skins and all? I hope so. I was facing the same problem ... going away for a week with tons of ripe tomatoes. I simply didn't have time to deal with them. Mostly they were paste maters, so I just washed them, let them dry, then put them in a ziploc and froze them. I was thinking that this would be okay for something like sauce or ketchup - something where I would be putting it through the food mill later.

Years previous to this I have always skinned them before freezing, so I am a little nervous about whether this will work. Is it what you do?

Ann

Ann, I have done it that way and it works just fine for anything where you're going to cook 'em and put 'em through the food mill anyway. (You can also pop 'em, frozen, into boiling water for a few seconds and slip the skins off, but if you have a food mill that's the easiest, IMHO.)

Congrats on your bumper harvest!

Zabby

Actually, you can skip the scalding step altogether. Just let them thaw a bit, or hold them under running water for a few seconds and the skins slip off easily. I generally take out the core and cut off any blemishes or splits, stick them in a ziplock and freeze. When I have enough to can, I peel them, let them come to room temperature, and can as usual. The texture isn't quite the same, but it's better than losing a lot of tomatoes because I don't have a canner load, or don't have time to work them.

Petro

I am all for the freezing of maters until you are able to deal with them especially if you are going to use them for recipes like salsa, spaghetti sauce or the sort. I blanch the maters and quarter them, measuring them out in the quantity that I will need for the various recipes. Or if I am using it for recipes that need only pulp I run them through the BacktoBasic food mill I have, which all you have to do is wash the mater cut it in quarters and run it through the mill. (I usually run the discarded part a few times to get all of the pulp from off of the skin.) Then measure this out in the quantity needed for these types of recipes. I can do bowls of tomatoes this way in very little time. Then....after the peaches, jams etc, that can't wait, I pull the maters out of the freezer and do mass quantities of my tomato recipes. In fact on Tuesday I put together 5 batches worth of spaghetti sauce in record speed, because the maters were already done. Then it simmer for the afternoon and I could then processed that evening. I now have 19 beautiful--if I say so myself-- quarts of spaghetti sauce. I plan to do this again this weekend with the regular tomatoes that are just quartered and make up Annie's salsa, which by the way it my absolute favorite!!

Anyhow, I love the freezer until time is on my side!!! The other benefit for this is if your tomatoes come on in small waves you can get a large quantity of maters so that your efforts in making tomato based products is worth your time and effort. I can't stand making one batch of anything at a time :)

Denise

Emily, when you return from vacation, you will be so happy that you canned the tomatoes before you left!

Be glad you have them. I alway over plant, thinking if I've got a bad year I'll still have enough. (you can always compost the leftovers)
This year, even though I planted about double what I thought I'd need, my garden ended up on the wrong side of the yellow disaster tape when a tornado went through our neighborhood. (our house is okay) but the garden is mostly flatened and twisted plants. That had a fair amount of debree on top. I was able to salvage enough to make 10 quarts of spagettie sauce. 1 watermellon, and lots of peppers (the tornado didn't hurt them as much for some reason.) the Cucumbers, beans and squash are completely gone. about 1/2 dozen brussle sprout stalks are stil good.

OTOH a lot of food shelves or places that provide meals (salvation army) will take extra produce if you don't want to deal with it. I usually donate a lot of extras.

laura sue,
I am sorry to hear about your garden. I am glad for you that nobody in family or your house were hurt.
Melly

Hi all --

Well I'm back, it was a really great break, and helped to get a week away from peeling tomatoes! Thanks for all your supportive replys! No tomatoes were thrown in the ocean, and in fact the Brandywines and yellow Brandywines I brought were so good that nearly every day for lunch I chopped up a tomato, put it in the bottom of a big bowl, poured hot pasta on top, added butter, parmesan, salt and pepper, and basically inhaled it and licked the bowl when done!

I think tomorrow I'll do sauce, so I can just run everything through the food mill and skip the peeling and seeding and whatnot that drive me insane!

mom2wildboys -- I was in Providence up until a year ago... Where in RI are you? We spent the week at East Beach, my favorite, so even though the weather wasn't great, it was still so good to smell and hear the ocean day and night!

Happy canning all!

Emily

Did someone say Roasted Tomato Garlic soup?

I'm drooling! Can you post the recipe?

Julie

You'll find it on this thread.

Carol

Here is a link that might be useful: Canning Tomatoes - No Pressure Canner?

Thanks, Carol!