Can-tastic!

This is a lot of tomatoes.

My mother-in-law is in town and yesterday she loaned her 30 years of canning experience to help me "put up" lots of tomatoes (probably about 40 pounds, costing me about $48). This is fourteen 32-oz jars (why do they call it canning when you use jars?) I borrowed the supplies (a very large pot, a mechanism that holds the jars in place, a gripper to pull the jars out of the boiling water and a funnel) from someone in the mothers' club.

The jars cost $1.10 each. I need to go to the store and figure out what the actual cost per oz is for the home-canned vs the store-bought. Of course there's a lot of work involved with the actual home canning, but there are benefits...

Tomatoes!

I use tomatoes in at least 50 percent of the recipes I regularly make, so when my mother-in-law comes to town at the end of the month, she's going to teach me how to can, and tomatoes are going to be the big staple to "put up" in our house. I'll be borrowing the gear from someone in the mothers' club and my neighbor is planning to come over and learn from the expert, too.

Yesterday I asked one of my favorite vendors at the Menlo Park Farmers' Market which of his tomatoes would be good for canning. He said I should buy one of his big boxes of "soft" tomatoes for $20. Oh my word that's a lot of tomatoes! Below is a picture of maybe half of them in the sink. Last night I boiled, peeled and chopped the rest. This morning I finished the job. About five of the tomatoes were too far gone to even be used for canning and another 5-10 were some variety that just disintigrated when I tried to peel them. It boils down to what seems like not very much: three gallon freezer bags filled half way.