The Best Tomato Sauce Ever...

I have a recipe for italian style stewed tomatoes, but wanted to change it a bit. The ensuing recipe makes a fabulous dipping sauce/tomato sauce/spaghetti sauce/soup starter.

Tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped are added to a mixture of onion, green peppers, fresh basil and chopped garlic. The amounts on these will vary according to your taste. Then added chopped zucchini and let it cook for about an hour. Next, run the mixture through your blender to finely chop and then can it.

Then pull it out with breadsticks or foccocia bread and use as a dip. It also makes a wonderful pizza sauce on top of foccicia bread with cheese and your favorite toppings. Add to meatballs and angel hair pasta for a quick meal. Take a jar and pour into a pan. Add one and a half jars of water, one jar of pasta noodles and some mini meatballs and let simmer for 30 minutes. Top with grated parmesan for a fantastic meal. Seriously a very versatile sauce and yummy flavor.

Enjoy, I have a whole pot simmering now that I will be canning in about an hour and the house smells amazing!

Baking Day

Today...baking. I have black walnut, chocolate chip cookies in the oven, italian bread rising and foccocia bread cooling. I still want to make wheat bread and pumpkin cookies before I call it a baking day success. I also put up a couple of more quarts of italian style stewed tomatoes. I could have done without that one today, but the tomatoes thought otherwise. The family sure is eating better these days!

The boys were working on the chicken laying boxes today. We may have found out why they keep laying all over the barn. It seems they don't like to lay in the same boxes they are sleeping in and they like to lay in a quiet spot. So the boys built some covers for several of the boxes. Hopefully that will increase our production numbers-at least the number we find! They have an order for 15 dozen eggs this weekend, so the girls better start laying where they are supposed to lay!

Tomatoes and Apples

Normally, these two crops do not come in at the same time. This year-they are. The apples are coming in early. Many think that the cool weather has them tricked into thinking that it is time, I don't know. I have gathered about 5 bushels from neighbors and they are in boxes telling me to deal with them! I think that I will make a lot of apple butter as it seems to be a favorite. Yesterday's apple crisp was a hit that will have to be repeated often in the next few weeks. I wonder if I can freeze them in freezer bags and have them ready to be made into apple crisp any time we want it? I will have to give it a try!

Tomatoes are also coming in now. The ones we planted early didn't do anything. Most of those plants died. The ones we put in the ground late are going nuts now. I am picking at least a Walmart plastic bag full every day. The romas are gorgeous. The others are just ripening and ripening. And the kids picked a bag of the yellow pear tomatoes alone yesterday. Those things are going nuts! Hopefully, I have the seeding thing right. I am trying to save the seeds from Mr. Stripey(heirloom), yellow pear (heirloom), red and yellow romas and a couple of the nice regular tomatoes. Today, I see more italian style tomato sauce in my future.

Tomatoes Coming Out of My Ears

Small yellow pear tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, red and yellow roma tomatoes and just plain tomatoes....what to do. Today, I have the yellow pear tomatoes and cherry tomatoes in the slow cooker to cook down into tomato paste. The roma tomatoes have been sliced and are in the dehydrators turning into yummy sun dried tomatoes. I will have to make some pesto later! I haven't made it yet, but it sure sounds yummy to compliment the foccicia bread. Then I blanched the regular tomatoes and have them ready to be made into salsa! I will freeze the salsa again so it is fresh salsa that I can pull out in January. Yummy, I can almost taste it now. Oh wait, I just did taste it with chips for lunch!

I also have some black walnuts in the oven drying at 150 degrees with the door open for the next several hours. If anyone knows some way to get those suckers out of their shells without all the work, I would appreciate the advice!

Breads

I spent the day yesterday making breads. I had applesauce canned and made that into applesauce spice bread. Walnuts gathered, hulled and dried from the yard added a bit more homemade flavor as did the eggs from our fat, happy chickens.

Then I made some pumpkin bread. I started with a pumpkin, not a can and baked and pureed the pumpkin before starting on the bread. The chickens were happy to eat the rind from the pumpkin. Those crazy birds will eat anything! I added some black walnuts from the yard and raisins to this bread.

Then I finished the afternoon off with some zucchini bread. It really is kind of boring compared to the others. The zucchini was shredded and the eggs were from our chickens, but other than that-kind of boring.

At this rate I am going to run out of black walnuts, so I gathered and hulled some yesterday while the bread was cooking. I need to get those into the oven to dehydrate today while it is nice and cool outside.

I am thinking of doing a trial batch of chocolate chip-black walnut cookies today. I can't wait to see how they turn out.

Today, Canning and Freezing

Seems like the story of my life right now, but it is starting to add up. The picklers are finally done producing and, besides the jars we ate and gave away, we have 35 quarts of pickles to get us through the winter. We have more jam and jelly than we will ever use. I guess that is why I have some for sale. Today, I will can more Italian style tomatoes since that is what we seem to use the most and shred up the rest of the zucchini for freezer storage. I should be able to make zucchini breads all through the winter for us and whoever orders some. Then it will be apple time. I still have about 2 1/2 bushels to process. We should have a lot of applesauce and tons of apple jelly for the winter. I will make some more into apple butter too so the house should smell awesome when we wake up in the morning!

White Chocolate, Oatmeal Pumpkin Cookies

Step 1: Pick a pumpkin. Yes, that says pick a pumpkin. Not go to the grocery store and buy a can of filling, but start by picking a pumpkin. Then go home and cut it in half, clean out the goo and place face down on a cookie sheet. Bake at 350 for about 45 minutes and the pumpkin will get mushy. When you can handle the pumpkin, go ahead and scoop out the stuff and puree in your food processor or blender. Then get ready to bake.

The difference between the pumpkin in a can and the umpkin you cook will make your cookies really taste special.

Enjoy!