It's late in the summer season, and early in the haunt season, so it is guaranteed to be a healthy dose of chaos in any home among my aquaintance. I like to get everything I possibly can get done, done at once, so come November I might be able to explore my sleeping options. One of the ways I've found to do more than one thing at once is to get several plates spinning on their sticks, and keep them there with a minimum of effort. Here is one method to do one thing while getting a slew of other stuff done.
Brace yourself, we're talking tomato sauce. Tomato sauce is probably the single most versitile canned item I know of to have on hand; it's the basis for chili, spaghetti sauce, a great component to soups, hot dish (or as we call it, red food), tomato soup... the list is pretty huge. I've never had a fondness for canned whole tomatoes, maybe it's a textural thing, maybe I've seen too many creepy canning collections that have dusty, unused canned tomatoes in them, dunno, they just don't seem to be what I care to put into jars. If you're having a not so great tomato year, head over to the farmer's market, and get a crate or two from that one ancient woman with the great produce.
In any case, get your haul into the kitchen and wash your maters. Here is the arsenal you'll need for making tomato sauce:
rectangular sheet cake pans, at least 2" deep, larger the better
slotted spoon
sharp knife
big stock pots
Kitchen Aid mixer with the grinider/juicer attachments
extra bowl
bowl to catch seeds and skins
canner, jars, rings, lids, lifter, timer, towels
Are your tomatoes washed yet? good. Preheat your oven to about 250 degrees. Now, take out your sheetcake pans, start halving or quartering your tomatoes. Make the pieces big enough to go through the feeder tube on your Kitchen Aid. Cut out any bad spots as needed. I remove the stems, but don't bother removing the stem ends. Closely stack your tomatoes into your cake pans, very close, but not squishing them. You do not want to squish your maters right now! Go ahead a heap them up a wee bit, maybe by one layer. Stick that first pan in the oven. Start on the next.
I've tried to be ambitious about getting as many maters going at once as I possibly can, but realized I have capacity to deal with about only about 2 gallons at a throw. 2 gallons is about 3 cake pans full for me.
When all your maters are in the oven, go do something else for, oh, four hours? You want to not completely dessicate them, but you do want to roast them to 1) carmelize the available sugars in the tomatoes 2) soften them considerably 3) get water out of the tomatoes.
Now, didn't it feel good to be able to do just about anything else you needed to get done finished up all while others think you were actively canning?
Alright, now that you have pans of mushy maters that have given up much of their water, set up your Kitchen Aid with bowls and everything, and pull the first pan out of the oven. Drain the water out. Now, you can keep this water and use it as liquid for vegetable stock, or you can toss it, which ever you please. Start feeding the tomatoes through the juicer. I use a slotted spoon, and I'm very careful to not tear or mush the tomatoes, so they come out of the pan as intact as possible. When my receiving bowl is full, I empty it into one of my big stockpots and keep heating the sauce while I continue on. I will send my seeds and skins through another time, just to get as many solids as I can out of them, too.
Empty your pans through the juicer. You will have a much thicker product than you are probably used to dealing with. I don't care for watery tomato sauce, so this is a good thing. When you've run everything through, your sauce is simmering away merrily on the stove, and you've cleaned up all your tomato mess, set your clean jars out, fill, lid and process in a hot water bath, 35 minutes for pints or 40 minutes for quarts. If you have questions on acidity, you can either add a TBS of lemon juice to each jar, or you can pressure can your sauce as you would for green beans or okra.
Keeping things hot during the duration is really important, drops in temperature just add a random element to your canning that you don't want or need. As it's in the oven, too, if you plan well, you might even run a couple errands while doing this job... gasp!
Good luck. As I find more to be able to do 8 things at once, I'll let you know!
