7 Quarts 9 Hours Later

By Amy Baranski

This day of canning lasted nine hours too long. Canning "tomato sauce" was very labor intensive. That was a WHOLE DAY for a two ingredient recipe.

While it was mostly fun (was it?) it's hard not to remind myself that it was a lot of time that I could have used for other things, you know, like reading my 45 pages a day. I gave up a whole weekend day for 7 quarts of "sauce," actually less than that because Melissa and I are splitting them. Depressing.

The best part about the process was the poutine that Melissa made for dinner. Oh poutine!

Instead of detailing each step to the canning process (which you could easily read in a canning recipe somewhere) I've posted pictures of the event after the jump.

We rinsed and drained the tomatoes.

And gave them a warm bath.

Then we processed them through the food mill.

A thin tomato sauce was the result of all that labor. 

It was a full pot! It took way to long to thicken and reduce.

We got hungry and Melissa made Poutine!

Mmmm fries.

I roasted a chicken with root vegetables.

It browned nicely.

And so did the Poutine. 

We had an out of body experience eating it.

After dinner we tended to the sauce. It had not reduced much further. 

But, it was time to jar it.

The sauce finally made it into the cans.

And into the water bath they went.