Tomatoes and Basil

Aaron and I tried our hand at canning this past weekend. We have many tomatoes in the garden but many are still green and we could not yield enough for canning so we purchased 2 tubs of plumb tomatoes from the local stand. We did tomato sauce which turned out amazing! We also made pesto with our basil from the yard and froze it in pucks. We used some recipes from our Put Em Up book but we tweaked the recipes to our taste. The pesto recipe we found very watery so we used one from online and modified the garlic amounts and also added some lemon juice and salt. The tomato sauce we added roasted garlic and sauteed mushrooms and I threw in some oregano, rosemary and bay leaves (removed bay leaves before canning).

PESTO SAUCE:

TOMATO SAUCE:

As for the tomatoes in our garden, we plan on cutting our plants and hanging them in the garage to ripen the tomatoes and use them for pizza sauce. We made pizza sauce with our garden tomatoes earlier this summer and it was amazing so we will be doing this and freezing the sauce in puck form. Freezing will cause the water to separate for us to remove and will make the sauce nice and thick; perfect for pizza! As for our cucumbers and zucchini, we ate most fresh and may only can a few zucchini and cucumber pickles, if any. We also have a box of plum tomatoes left from the local stand and plan on making some salsa as well. Thanks to my friend Jenn, we have plenty of cans!