July 3rd 2014 And We Attacked The Garden
Tomato sauce is any of a very large number of sauces made primarily from tomatoes, usually to be served as part of a dish (rather than as a condiment). Tomato sauces are common for meat and vegetables, but they are perhaps best known as sauces for pasta dishes.
Tomatoes have a rich flavor, high liquid content, very soft flesh which breaks down easily, and the right composition to thicken into a sauce when they are cooked (without the need of thickeners such as roux). All of these qualities make them ideal for simple and appealing sauces. The simplest tomato sauces consist just of chopped tomato flesh cooked in a little olive oil and simmered until it loses its raw flavor, and seasoned with salt.
Optionally tomato skins may be scalded and peeled according to texture (especially thicker pelati paste varieties) and tomato seeds may be removed to avoid their bitterness.
Did You Know?
The average Joe. 93% American gardening households grow tomatoes.
Fresh tomatoes. Fresh-market tomatoes are grown in all 50 states.
Biggest worldwide producers. The largest worldwide producer of tomatoes is China, followed by USA, Turkey, India and Egypt.
Biggest U.S. producer – processed tomatoes. California produces 96% of the tomatoes processed in the U.S.
We Start In The Garden
Tomato plants are pretty until they begin to produce fruit
This bush was loaded with fruit
Did You Know? - Tomato juice is the official state beverage of Ohio.
After picking them, the plants will produce on the recontenting flowers
Action Switches To The Kitchen
NOTE: You will not see pictures of us! Do you have any idea how we look after picking 150 tomatoes, boiling them, peeling them, squeezing them, grinding them and finally cooking them! We look like walking tomatoes!
We were worse after five hours of picking and cooking
We had boxes of fruit in the kitchen before we began cooking
Did You Know? - The use of tomato sauce with pasta appears for the first time in the Italian cookbook L'Apicio moderno, by Roman chef Francesco Leonardi, edited in 1790
We drop the fruit in boiling water just enough to get the skin hot
The whole tomato is dropped in "cool" water and voila, the skins become easy to remove!
Did You Know? - Tomato sauce was an ancient condiment in Aztec food. The first western person to write of what may have been a tomato sauce was Bernardino de Sahagún, who made note of a prepared sauce that was offered for sale in the markets of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City today). Spaniards later brought the use of tomatoes to Europe.
We use different colors to provide different tastes in the sauce
Red and greens... Whatever we can find.
After peeling them
we hand squeeze out the seeds and put the recontents in a blender!
Did You Know? - According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Americans eat between 22- 24 pounds of tomatoes per person, per year. (More than half of those munchies are ketchup and tomato sauce.)
PS... That means for Joe (our son) that someone is eating 44-48 pounds!
There is still a lot of water in the sauce so we boil it for about three hours
The boiling removes the water and leave the concentrated sauce
This will boil down by about 60% before it is ready
Did You Know? - The tomato is America's fourth most popular fresh-market vegetable behind potatoes, lettuce, and onions.
Voila... Six quarts to tomato sauce...
Sue does NOT season it until it is used so we can make it Italian, Mexican, Indian, or ??? 
Paul gets cleanup duty
And we still have more of sauce making on Monday!