Tons of Tomatoes

You say tomato and I say tomato.....I am so ready to call the whole thing off.

Last week we took a quick inventory.  We only have a couple of quarts of green beans, but green beans were hard to come by in Michigan so we are going to have to wait and hope for next year.  Last week we used up  our last pint of spaghetti sauce.  DH and I experimented with spaghetti squash and spaghetti sauce with meat and I will say it was yummy, so definitely needed more tomato sauce!  DH also informed me we only had 9 quarts of tomato basil soup.

I had an e-mail from one of the farm stands where I shop that tomatoes were still coming in, so Friday the Finn and I headed out early in the morning to get some tomatoes.

We purchase 4 boxes of Roma tomatoes, and I started blanching.  I didn't have to remove the skin because the tomatoes would be run through a Victorio food mill. You can see a pic of the food mill I use by clicking the link, since I am absolutely in love with it!

This is our turkey fryer kettle it was the only one big enough to hold a bushel of crushed tomatoes, and all the other ingredients for Spaghetti sauce.  You can see that I am blanching the next box of tomatoes beside the pot. 

We ended up with 20 quarts and 1 pint of spaghetti sauce.

DH and I finished up cooking the tomatoes and made 14 quarts and 9 pints of tomato basil soup.

DH and I were talking that it would be nice to have a second canner/pressure cooker so we wouldn't be waiting as much.  When we canned tuna at the coast in Oregon we ran 2 canners and it was so nice.  The MIL called last Saturday night, she had broken the door off a cabinet and needed it fixed, which meant that my Sunday would be spent at her house.  I was not thrilled.  I asked DH if his mamma had a pressure cooker and he said he thought so, and she had never used it.  All I can say is S-C-O-R-E!  A brand new 22 quart pressure cooker still in the box and unopened from 1993.  It is nice to be able to run a couple of canners at the same time. 

While working on the canning I got a wee bit of sewing accomplished.

This is the row from Sauder Village for the Row by Row.  I love the colors but the laser cut was not easy to peel off and was a bit frustrating.  Now to sew it down. 

I got all the portions fixed that were wrong and it all sewn together.  Let's just say that while I like the quilt, my skills have increased immensely since I started working on it, there are some lost points, the persnickety odd cuts with 1/8th inch increments  which ended up with lot of biased edges made me crazy.    I have some borders and they have bias triangles set within them. 

I have had some fabric acquisitions lately too.  I have been working on some yoyos and I wanted red, white, or blue.  This layer cake from Moda by Minick and Simpson called Polka-Dot & Paisleys.

I think it will just fit the bill.  I need to figure out how many yoyos I need so I can continue my mania.  Why does it feel like I have less and less time for sewing?