Italy

Roasting red peppers is pretty easy to do if a bit finicky at first. In this video I'm fumbling around with it quite a bit in part because I only do this once a year during harvest time, and this was the first time this year, and in part because silly me chose peppers which were largely inappropriate for roasting. You want to select peppers that are larger, and fairly regularly shaped. This video was taken a few weeks ago when peppers were just in season, and I got so excited that I just picked up a bushel without thinking about it first. Today I picked up about a half bushel of large, nicely formed peppers for my pasta sauce today, and I had them all roasted and peeled in no time at all - less than 2 hours.

There we go, the sauce is finally in the canner! This is definitely not a sauce for someone who does not like a lot of work since it takes a good 2 or 3 days to make. First of all, it contains a lot of roasted red pepper, which itself takes a good day of work. Though I roasted about twice what I needed for this recipe and canned the rest. Hmmm, note to self : I still have not written the article on roasting peppers, so please stay tuned for that. Last year was the first year I used roasted red peppers in my Pasta / Pizza sauce, and I liked it so much that I'm doing largely the same thing with a few tweaks.

The biggest difference between this year and last year is that this time around I wanted to use up some zucchini from our CSA, so I decided to toss a good sized one in there. I also have a 2 or 3 pounds of heirlooms tomatoes in there this year as well - just to use up ones from the CSA. I did not measure either, but I did measure another zucchini that was about the same size, and it was 650g. Heirloom tomatoes about 2 or 3 lbs - together after cooking it down for about an hour they made up exactly 2 litres of puree that went into the main sauce.

It's canning time again! Yesterday we were supposed to go over to friends' place for supper, but Melissa and I ended up sick (she a lot worse than I) and so yesterday morning we unfortunately had to cancel. After I had a few cups of coffee into me, I decided I wasn't going to let the day go to waste, and headed down to the end of the street to the farmer's market to pick up a bushel of roma (plum) tomatoes. I figured if I was going to be cooped up in the house all day feeling crummy, the very least I could do was something useful. And canning always makes me feel better.

I started processing the tomatoes before I actually knew what I was going to do with them. At that point my head was pretty thick (and no, not from beer for a change) and all I knew was that I needed to put down some form of tomato. I just wasn't sure which form. Pretty much no matter what you do, you have to plunge them in boiling water for 1 or 2 minutes, peel the skin off, cut them open, scoop out the goop from the little chambers, then boil down the flesh. How much you boil it down depends on what you are making. If just canning tomatoes, you just boil it a half hour or so. If making pasta sauce, you have to boil to half it's volume which takes a heck of a long time especially in a big pot with a smallish surface area.