Homemade Goodness

This was yet another busy weekend: there was hay to be baled (although, not a lot), laundry to be done (done, but not put away) gardens to weed, and tomatoes to can. As many of you know, my life's goal was to make ketchup, and for the last four years, I have failed. Either I used the wrong tomatoes (who knew you had to use paste tomatoes?), or the blight killed everything. This year I grew the correct tomatoes (Roma's) and protected them from blight. Boy, did I do a good job. I had about fifty pounds of Roma tomatoes (first picking!) and I just went to town. I started with ketchup (my life's goal). While I used about thirty pounds of tomatoes, it only made nine pints of ketchup. But the amount doesn't matter; what matters is that I was successful!! It was a lot of time and work and I'm a little afraid that when I try it, I won't like it. But, again, I conquered the ketchup!! Once finished with that, I still had about twenty pounds of tomatoes left and I decided to make pasta sauce. I was planning on using recipes to make both the sauce and the ketchup, but they make handy mix pouches which cuts down on having to make spice bags (thank you Mrs. Wages!) The pasta sauce smells a-m-a-z-i-n-g (if I do say so myself) and I'm super excited to try it.

On a side note: While putting away my canned goods, I discovered that the cherry sauce had set, so I conquered jam, too!