Most years right around this time we have a surfeit of tomatoes (an excess). This year I have made several batches of sauce and frozen them for winter, and today I made plain old tomato juice and walked around my neighborhood and gave it to my neighbors. It is pretty easy to make with the tomato press we have. The simple screw type mechanism feeds the crushed tomatoes through a metal screen and separates the juice from the skins and seeds. I added just a little bit of salt to the mix, put the juice in pint jars, and got to visit with my neighbors, and rave about the juice as "the essence of Big Lagoon." I made sure they understood that this was unprocessed juice and needed to be consumed quickly. My neighbors were amused, but within an hour I received phone calls telling me how good the juice was.
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| tomato juice |
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| tomato juice bottled |
We grew some nice Roma tomatoes this year. It is a paste variety which is not as watery as many tomatoes, and is good for sauce. I made the sauce by cutting the tomatoes in half, adding a chopped onion, and quite a bit of fresh basil leaves, some good organic Napa Valley olive oil, some salt, and just a sprinkle of sugar. I cooked this down for an hour or so, then put it through the tomato press as with the juice, and had a nice batch of sauce after cooking it down some more.
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| Roma tomatoes |
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tomato sauce cooking
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