I think you could use stewed tomatoes - if you add other ingredients (for instance celery, sugar, salt), just adjust the fresh ingredients in Annie's recipe to account for those. Our "tomato sauce" is just all the hunks of tomatoes that are left after I have enough for salsa and/or trimmings from bruised ones or I'm just so tired of looking at tomatoes spread all over the kitchen that I throw them in the sauce pot. No seasonings - just cook the tomatoes down a bit to get rid of some of the water. Then I either whiz 'em with a stick blender or leave 'em chunky. Freeze in those 3 cup plastic containers that stack very nicely in the freezer. After a batch or two (and tasting along the way), you'll get to know if you need to add a wee bit more paste or a spoonful of sauce to get the taste and texture you want. Start off on the light side, then you can add more if needed. Have fun!

Here you go: ANNIES SALSA 8 cups tomatoes, peeled, chopped and drained 2 ½ cups chopped onion 1 ½ cups chopped green pepper 3  5 chopped jalapenos 6 cloves minced garlic 2 tsp cumin 2 tsp pepper 1/8 cup canning salt ¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro 1/3 cup sugar 1/3 cup vinegar 16 oz. tomato sauce 16 oz tomato paste Mix all ingredients, bring to a boil, boil 10 minutes. Pour into hot jars, process at 10 lbs of pressure for 30 minutes for pints. Makes 6 pints if I want to process in a BWB up the vinegar to one cup and process 10 minutes in BWB. You can safely leave out the cumin abd/or the green peppers but do not increase the cilantro NOTE: To repeat what Annie said, the Extension agency no longer recommends canning in quarts or pressure canning her salsa (probably because they don't have the resources to test it). For those who have made it in the past, the pressure canned recipe called for a smaller amount of vinegar. So, to update, make Annie's salsa with a full cup of vinegar, can only in pints and boiling water bath for 15 minutes. (From Carol) Use the Harvest forum search at the bottom of the front page not the GW-wide search at the top of the page. Dave

Kate, this is the first year I've done this pepper, so I did half sweet and half without sweetener. The unsweetened batch got garlic, black peppercorns, allspice berries and bay leaf. The sweet ones got pickling spice. I did run a darning needle through each one to be sure the pickling brine could enter the peppers. I learned that trick from Grandma when we canned spiced crabapples, she made me run a darning needle through from the stem to the blossom end so they wouldn't explode. That's odd about your leathery peppers. I canned a batch of "cowboy candy", which was basically a bread and butter pickle with peppers in place of cucumbers and they came out fine, not tough. No one really liked them, though, the people in the family who like the sweeter pickles don't like hot peppers and vice versa, so I haven't done that again. These are going to have to be darned good if they are a repeat because they are definitely tedious! Annie

Agree— anything under 30 seems almost easy. Almost… there were a few hiccups this am. Luckily I remember the cricketing term that comes up regularly from reading Dorothy Sayer mysteries fifty years ago. 👑🐝 for 124. This is less bragging than a marking down of something in my life I can actually control. (Well, a little bragging but not too much bc it does get so much easier the longer you’re at it.) edited to reduce this number to 124 from the 125 i first posted yesterday. i can spell like heck but i obviously can’t count. Today it’s 125 and hopefully tomorrow it will be 126.