Winter Comfort Food: Tomato Soup and Simple Mac and Cheese

Lately I have really been enjoying the recipes I have tried from Heavenly Homemakers.  I recently came across this recipe for tomato soup that is made from fresh tomatoes and can actually be canned.  I love tomato soup and I do love canning, so I was immediately intrigued.

You see, I grew up on Campbell's tomato soup. Despite the fact that the second ingredient is high fructose corn syrup, I still buy it and still like it once in awhile. It's a childhood thing.

Now in the summertime, we use just about every tomato we can get for our favorite spaghetti sauce canning recipe.  But, I'm always open to squeezing in a new recipe if it's really great and if it's something we will love in the middle of the winter.  If it can be an actual meal for us?  Even better.  I mean, I do like jam and jelly, but seriously, how much can you eat of that stuff?

So I happened across this tomato soup recipe.  Four simple ingredients:  tomatoes, onion, butter and salt.  Three hours on the stove.  A splash of cream.  Heaven in a bowl.

I was just going to bookmark the recipe and add it to my list this summer, but then I had an idea.  My father-in-law gave us a bunch of quarts of tomatoes he canned last summer, and I still had some left.  I decided to use those to try out the tomato soup recipe so I could see how it tasted before I allocate our precious summer tomatoes to a recipe I've never tried.

I ran 6 quarts of tomatoes through the food mill to remove the seeds and doubled the tomato soup recipe.  If a recipe is going to have to cook for three hours, I'm going to make a BIG batch.  When it was finished simmering, I used my immersion blender to puree it in the pot.  And then I tasted it... wonderful.  It had just the flavor I was looking for:  simple and tomatoey.  And, it goes well with this delicious recipe for easy, creamy macaroni and cheese.

We ended up eating some that day (Molly gobbled it up), putting about 2 quarts in the fridge, and I froze another 3 quarts.  This recipe will be definitely be on the priority list this summer.  We'll see how much canning I get done with baby #2 due 9/15....!

Last Canning Project of the Season??? Honey Apple Butter

This week I made honey apple butter, which was wonderful.  We had been accumulating quite a selection of apples in the refrigerator, and I am almost out of the maple apple butter that I made 2 years ago.  Maple syrup was an incredible accompaniment to apple butter, but it is pretty expensive and I already used my stash of maple syrup in some fabulous maple blueberry jam this summer.  Also, we had our first honey harvest this year and have lots of honey to get creative with!  No problem.  I like a challenge like that.

Sweet Cider Apple Butter, adapted from the Ball Blue Book of Preserving
yield:  about 16 - 8oz. jars (this is a double batch!)

12 pounds apples (I like to use a combination of varieties)
4 cups apple cider
1 quart honey
1 teaspoon cloves
1 tablespoon cinnamon

Directions:

First, a picture of my little helper/apple thief Molly. 

All the apples went into the sink for a good wash first.  Before I started cutting apples, I put my frozen (from last season) apple cider in an 8 quart stockpot on the stove.  As the cider melted, I quartered, cored and peeled all of the apples, throwing them in the pot to start cooking and soften.  To be honest, I forgot how many apples 12 pounds is!  I wished I had taken out my apple/peeler/corer/slicer to speed up the process.

Once the apples were pretty soft, I took my handy stick blender and pureed the apples until they were nice and smooth.  I like my apple butter silky smooth, so blend them as much as you prefer.  The recipe says not to liquify it.

                                     

Then I added my honey and spices, stirred, turned the stove down to low and cooked slowly all day, stirring occasionally.  See how dark it got?  You just want it to thicken slowly without sticking to the bottom of the pan or popping up and splashing out.  This takes several hours, but the house smells incredible as it cooks.  For some people, the whole process would NOT generally take an entire day to do, but I had many, many distractions and interruptions hanging out with little Molly that it took longer than it would have had I been by myself.  But... by the end of the day it was done and that's what counts!

Once the apple butter cooked down to a consistency I prefer, I processed 8 oz jars for 10 minutes in a boiling water bath canner. 

Try a sandwich of cream cheese and honey apple butter on this homemade whole wheat bread... YUM.

Until Next Year...

Over the weekend we harvested the last of our garden for the season: tomatoes, zucchini and a few small onions.  My birthday was on Saturday, and it seems that every year my birthday is the turning point between summer and fall.  We still have some kale (lacianato and Red Russian) and broccoli that I will leave in the ground and keep picking until the plants or I give up.  Apparently kale tastes sweeter after a nip of frost anyway.  I actually feel lucky to have harvested what I did this year.  With the addition of toddler Molly this year, I just didn't have the time or energy to spend in the garden like I have in years past.  The weather was also cooler than usual this summer, so the plants didn't do as well as they usually do.  However, considering the little time I did spend gardening, I am thankful for what we ended up with!  I'm already dreaming of next spring; hopefully we will have tons of asparagus and strawberries again next year. 

Even though it seems like our garden didn't produce as much as usual this year, I am thankful I was able to take advantage of our local farmers markets to buy extra fresh fruits and vegetables in season and mostly organic so that I could preserve them (relatively inexpensively) for our long, cold winter in Michigan.

This is what I froze this year:

::  Corn, blanched and cut from the cob

::  Strawberries (ours)

::  Blueberries

::  Zucchini, some grated, some diced (many were ours)

::  Green and red peppers, diced

::  Three kinds of pesto:  basil, basil/parsley and basil/spinach

And this is what I canned this year:

::  Spaghetti sauce (some tomatoes were ours)

::  Jalapeno salsa

::  Cayenne jalapeno salsa

::  Habanero jalapeno salsa

::  Dill pickles

::  My grandma's sweet pickles

::  Danish cherry sauce

::  Strawberry sauce (our strawberries)

::  Strawberry lemon marmalade (our strawberries)

::  Low sugar cherry jam

::  Summer solstice jam

::  Peach jam

::  Low sugar peach jam

::  Peach and honey jam (this was before our honey harvest)

::  Honey apple butter (our honey)

::  Cherry chutney
::  Low sugar blueberry maple jam
::  Grape juice (our grapes)

We also have some potatoes from our garden, tomato juice canned by my parents and green beans and stewed tomatoes canned by my father-in-law.  95% of the fruit and vegetables that we put away for the winter were grown either by us, our parents, my grandfather or the farmers at the farmers market.  It's good to know where your food comes from!  I'm always looking for new ideas for preserving fruits and vegetables.  What kinds of produce did you preserve this year?

HOT Salsas

Recently I visited my grandpa's farm garden and collected many, many hot peppers, pledging to do "something" with them. I had jalapeno, cayenne and habenero peppers along with lots of tomatoes, bell peppers, green beans, zucchini and cucumbers. I have some friends and family members who like super-hot foods, so I thought I might just try a recipe I came across for jalapeno salsa. I ended up making three batches of salsa:  one batch of jalapeno salsa, and then two more batches replacing some of the jalapenos with cayenne and habenero peppers.

I didn't want to spend the time taking out the seeds and veins of the peppers partially because they are so darned small and I had so many peppers, but also I didn't want that hot stuff touching my fingers! Most of my canning escapades happen during my daughter's nap time or after she goes to bed, so time is always of the essence. To save some time, I threw all of the cleaned and trimmed ingredients in the food processor to be chopped up for a slightly smoother textured salsa.  This moved things along a bit and didn't make too big of a mess.

I haven't tried any of the salsa yet. I'd like to say it's because the recipe said to let it mellow for 3-4 weeks, but really I think it is going to be SO hot! Even the jalapeno one, let alone the habenero. I canned some delicious peach salsa earlier this summer, and it was plenty warm with about 4 jalapenos in it. I didn't count all the peppers in these recent batches, but I know I had 11 habeneros plus some japalenos in one batch. This stuff is going to be HOT.  Hope everybody likes it!

Enough Spaghetti Sauce for the Year

Over the weekend we canned our last batch of tomato sauce of the season. My goal this year was 4 batches and wahoo, we're done!! It is a lot of work, but a few busy summer weekends pays off all year long with our luscious red gold from a jar. Rich, tomatoey, a touch of spice... there's nothing like it. I love knowing each and every ingredient that goes into this favorite quick, easy meal of ours. The smell you encounter every time you walk in the house from outside while the sauce is coooking is absolutely heavenly.

Seasoned Tomato Sauce, adapted from the Ball Blue Book of Preserving

yield: about 14 pints or 7 quarts

30 pounds tomatoes

4 cups chopped onions

8 cloves garlic, minced

1/3 cup olive oil

1 1/3 tablespoons oregano

4 bay leaves

2/3 tablespoon black pepper

1 tablespoon sugar

1/6 cup salt

1 1/3 teaspoons crushed red pepper

bottled lemon juice for canning

Canning our favorite spaghetti sauce is quite an event and takes all day... sometimes even into the next day if I take too long to get started. My recipe starts off with a 20 quart stock pot filled with washed, cored and quartered tomatoes. Plum tomatoes are the best since they tend to have the most solid/least liquid but any will work. I have made batches with any and every tomato I can find to get up to the 30 pounds, including cherry tomatoes.

I squeeze the tomatoes as I add them to the pot, bringing out the juices so that tomatoes can start to cook without burning to the bottom of the pan. I cook these until they are nice and soft.

Once the tomatoes soften, I run them all through the vegetable strainer that attaches to my KitchenAid mixer. This removes the seeds and skin, which go into the compost.

The tomato juice goes into a 16 quart stock pot with the rest of the ingredients, and then you cook, cook...

and cook it some more.

It takes many hours to cook the sauce down to a consistency I like for spaghetti sauce, and it is worth the time and effort to get it to be nice and thick. I usually cook it down by half - so basically I end up with 7-8 quarts when I start out with about 16 quarts. Add 2 T lemon juice to quarts or 1 T lemon juice to pints, and process quarts in a water bath canner for 40 minutes, pints for 35 minutes. The entire process takes 8-10 hours. Enjoy all year.