Tomato

Since I made the salsa and pasta / pizza sauce really mild this year, I wanted to make a nuclear hot chili sauce to compensate. Something that I could use just like that, or mix into one of my other tomato sauces to spice it up a bit. I did some googling and asking around, and finally found a recipe that really appealed to me. I did not follow that recipe to the T - left out the salt and pepper, and the vinegar. The latter I believe was only added to make it suitable for boiling water canning, which I do not have to do since I pressure can.

I wanted a sweet tomato-based sauce that was spicey as heck, and that's what I got! It's got apples, peaches, pears and honey to sweeten it up. It calls for 10 lbs of tomatoes - I used 7 lbs of romas, 2 lbs of various heirlooms from my CSA, and about 1300 ml of canned diced tomatoes from my 2006 batch.

We did not make any salsa last summer and so ran out some time ago. When I went looking for my recipe I dug up a list of ingredients but unfortunately had not recorded the procedure before, so I was shooting in the dark a bit here. This time I'm recording it all for posterity though!

Note that due to the lack of vinegar this recipe is not suited to canning by any means other than pressure-canning. The lack of vinegar makes for a nice sweet, fresh flavour that is very similar to the fresh salsas that are so popular these days. This is easy to make, though does take some time to boil down. We cheat and add a bit of corn starch to help thicken it.

This is pretty mild for spiciness.

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.

We were at Costco yesterday and I was looking at some of the various BBQ sauces they had in stock, trying to decide between Tony Roma's, Bull's Eye Original, and some other "Kansas City Style" that I'd never heard of before. I wrote off the last one pretty easily because I wasn't even aware that Kansas City had its own style of BBQ sauce, but I was familiar with both of the other two and really like them both. Oh decisions, decisions.

Then it struck me - what the heck do I need to buy this stuff for? Surely I can make something every bit as good as these! I took a quick look at the ingredients and agreed with myself that yes, indeed I could do as well! Though I had not the slightest clue at that moment exactly how.

We made our way back home, and around noon my wife got called into work unexpectedly. Shortly after she left I had an epiphany! We had all sorts of pickles of various sorts in the basement - stuff we'd canned up over the last several years. I was betting that some combination of those with a good tomato base would be awesome! Little did I realise at the time just how right I was! The base for most BBQ sauces is sweet on the one hand, and vinegar/sour on the other hand. This is also the base for most home pickles!

I love chow! Or "chow chow" as we always called it! So about 12 years ago now I tried to make it, and ended up putting waaaay too much all spice and cloves into it. Wow that was overpowering! And it shied me away from making them for some 10 years. And unfortunately when I did make them 10 years later I'd already forgotten the lesson of the all spice and cloves, so when I made this they were waaaaay too spicy, but have mellowed now with age. Normally when I make something I don't follow a recipe, I take a look at several recipes to figure out the 'essence' of that thing, and then use that knowledge to decide what I want to do for myself.

This is the same approach I used for my Chow back in 2007 when my Aikido Sensei wanted to make a big batch with me to split, so I'll give all the recipes together along with what we finally made.

This recipe is from Madhur Jaffrey's book, "From Curries To Kebabs", and is very easy to make. It's simmering away on the stove right now and smells delish! As with any Indian recipe, it's best to have your ingredients measured and prepared ahead of time to keep things moving along.

One of my all-time favorite comfort foods is Goulash! It is simple, both to make and in terms of what it consists of - hearty, and versatile since you can put just about anything into a goulash and spice it any number of ways. I've been on something of a thyme kick lately, so there is is lots of that in there.

Two of the main ingredients are beef and diced tomatoes. For the former we are using ground beef from one of the local farmers that we deal with. It is non-certified organic, and absolutely fantastic tasting! For the tomatoes we are using a pint / 500ml jar of diced roma tomatoes that we put down in the fall of 2006. We do a lot of tomatoes every year - buy them by the bushel at the farmers' market at the end of our street, and process and can them up.

In the spring #1 son wanted to grow his own tomatoes so that he could make ketchup in the fall. While his plants didn't produce very well and he otherwise has somewhat lost interest (for reasons to be explained below), I myself did keep the dream alive, and just made some now. Actually, I started it on Sunday morning.

OK, here is what I came up with, basically combining a few recipes that I found on-line.

I started out with tomatoes from my CSA. I'm lucky this year in that I'm the last pit-stop of his 5 pickup points. Sometimes he has buckets of "off" fruit and veggies that people can pick through if they want, in addition to their regular order. Last week he had a huge bucket of "off" tomatoes that nobody else seemed interested in, so I got the whole bucket - about 15 litres. They were mostly not "off", just imperfect. A few bad spots here and there, but not much. So I peeled and seeded them, discarding any real off spots as I went along. Oh, and they were mostly a very nice variety of different heirloom tomatoes.

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.