Canning Organic Tomato Sauce

I bought as many organic plum-style tomatoes as would fit into one bike pannier at the farmer's market this morning. Now I'm covered with essence of tomato as the pot burbles away and I try not to think about the fact that my output for the day is likely to be about four $10 jars of pasta sauce.

The fun of course is rationalizing the cost. My favourite argument, which I have dubbed the ratio ad impulsum emptori, or the Argument of Impulse Shopping, is that if I hadn't used the entire afternoon blanching, peeling and seeding tomatoes, I might have ended up spending a small fortune on mani-pedis, sushi and movie popcorn.

I guess I'm kind of freestyling this batch. I sizzled a handful of chopped organic garlic in some nice fruity olive oil. Then I added the chopped tomato flesh and juice after the skins, seeds and tough stem-connection parts had been removed. I tossed in a little salt, some ground black pepper, some thyme, a few bay leaves and a pinch of sugar. I let it boil slowly for a little while.

Now it's just a matter of letting the whole thing simmer (covered) until it seems smooth. These tomatoes are so robust that they're resisting breaking down. Jonathan assures me that the covered simmering will do the trick, (He also says "By the way, if you put a couple of chef's tears in there... it always tastes better.")

In the meantime, I've washed the soup and sauce jars my mom gave me after I used up all of mine on pickles. Oh, and I'm blogging.

After a pause of about three hours, I added some red wine and cooked the sauce on a fairly high heat for a few minutes. Now I've heated the glass jars and filled them; they're in the canner heating up. I'll be up late because they need at least 40 minutes in fully boiling water, and they're probably 15 minutes away from the boil. The batch has yielded 4½ quarts; I figure it cost about $7.50 each for the big jars and $3 or $4 for the small one. Jonathan tossed a few spoonfuls on some Chef Boyardee canned ravioli. He apparently had no complaints.