Tomato Juice? Yes
Salsa? Yes
Pizza Sauce? Yes (once)
Spaghetti Sauce? No Never
Until this year. The tomato plants just won't (present tense) quit producing tomatoes. So I decided to finally try my hand at making spaghetti sauce. We're not huge spaghetti w/ meat sauce eaters, but I think that's about to change. I like to write just how I think, so here goes.
My friend makes spaghetti sauce so I asked her for the recipe. She obliged and emailed it right over. The email began with, "I loosely follow this recipe." Then she went on to share her directions. My first time. Loose directions. More directions. The original recipe starts with canned tomatoes, but I'm supposed to convert that into garden fresh tomatoes. I just couldn't do it, so I did what any woman with an entire cabinet full of cookbooks, canning manuals, and food magazines would do.....I Googled "Homemade Canned Spaghetti Sauce". I found a recipe with similar ingredients to the original "loosely followed recipe" only this one started with a 1/2 bushel of garden fresh tomatoes. Now that I can understand. Even better it claimed to take only 3 hours. Perfect! Because that's exactly the amount of time I'm willing to spend on this project.
Approximately 32 hours later, I began ladling spaghetti sauce into clean, hot Kerr jars. I'm not sure where exactly the "3 hours" number came from. Maybe they assumed the tomatoes were already picked, washed, weighed, and quartered. Maybe they thought my food press was hooked up to an electric crank with endless energy for cranking and saucing tomatoes. Maybe they were home alone without any butts to wipe, books to read, writing assignments to edit, clothes to wash, lunch to make, dinner to make. Maybe they were simply in a time warp. I'm going with the last one.
Anyway, the sauce is on the canning shelf ready for our next spaghetti supper, which looks to be sometime in December based on our spaghetti eating history.
Here's the picture version of what I did...basically.
By the way, more tomatoes await picking.
The recipe I used, which I followed to the "T" came from food.com.
As always HAPPY CANNING!
