Wednesday started early, about 6AM. I had two 20# boxes of tomatoes and the 10# that had ripened from the previous boxes, plus what had been picked on Tuesday. Well over 50# of tomatoes.
In between all this I was getting seed garlic ready to sell, as people were coming to pick it up. I also had 2 orders of garlic to mail out so a trip to the post office was in there too.
After washing them all, I blanched them for 30 seconds so the skins would peel off, and then put them in ice water to stop the cooking. They were also cored but not seeded. It took all morning to get them done.
I had to measure up how many cups of sauce came out of the Squeezo for how many cups of chunked tomatoes. The recipe called for cups of chunked tomatoes, but I would be running them through the Squeezo before cooking. I ended up with 60 cups of sauce.
I decided to use enough for 6 batches of ketchup, hopefully giving me 36 pints for the year. The rest would go to making a tomato soup base I would freeze.
By the time I had chopped the onions and peppers and got them into the simmering sauce, it was late afternoon. They cooked for a couple hours and I ran them through the blender and back through the Squeezo instead of a sieve. I hadn’t been able to add the vinegar as my stockpots weren’t big enough until the sauce cooked down.
I cooked the sauce for 1½ hours after supper but it still wasn’t the right consistency so I turned it off and went to bed. I’ll finish it on Thursday morning, along with the soup base.