salsa

 Kyle is out on another call, and i cant sleep when he is gone so i am catching up my blog and watching the office!

Kyle and I have a few common hobbies,

taking pictures and learning about photography,

the outdoors/hunting, and I am proud to say i drew a elk tag this year,

Our beautiful kids

and

the garden.

Kyle has made our garden huge, 

we get about a huge zucchini and squash everyday,

I have a bag full of cherry tomatoes and I had 77 big tomatoes!

Kyle decided that we were going to use those tomatoes to jar some salsa! 

So we bought a few essential canning tools and read up on it and started today! 

 Lauren, the queen of canning, has always told me and wrote on her blog how much work canning was. I never doubted her, but holy crap-o-la, it is alot of work!

First you have to boil all the tomatoes so that the skins will peel off easy. I dont have a fancy dancy veggy steamer pot thinger, so i just dunked them in boiling water till the skins started to peel up.

Then I would toss them into cold water in my sink! 

Till they look like this...

this little process took forever.

Kyle helped me peel the tomatoes while I got Grace ready for school.

After all of that i really wanted to be done, but i had a big bowl of skinless tomatoes so i had to keep going.

Then i cut them all up into little pieces,

and threw them into the biggest pot in my home, which is not big enough when it comes to canning. After i got all the tomatoes cut up i threw some onions, peppers, cilantro, salt, and sugar in with them and blended them up.

Then started to boil it.

and after a hour or so it was still watery, so i had to get some advise from Lauren and she told me to keep boiling.

So i kept boiling for a long, 

long time, 

till Kyle told me that it looked thick enough.

Then i put them into jars,

and into the water bath.

 After 20 minutes in the boiling water the seals were still popping, so i called Lauren again, she told me to flip them over and so thats what i did!

And guess what?!

It worked!

After 6 or so hours i have 9 pints of salsa, was it worth it?

Not really.

Will I do it again, only next time make spaghetti sauce?

Yes probably, cause i have about a billion more tomatoes out on my bushes!!