Here you go, @riverflows, as you were so disappointed to not see the beet mess…
I spent the early morning on Sunday boxing up the last of the canning jars and getting the kitchen ready to make spaghetti sauce. My friend arrived about 8:45 and we started chopping vegetables. Once those were done, we ran the tomatoes through the Squeezo. If you push the wrong way, you end up wearing tomato.
We got 6½ of the big yellow bowls of sauce and that filled these 4 Dutch ovens, along with all the peppers, onions, garlic, and seasonings.
This is all the waste from 48 lbs of tomatoes from the Squeezo. It’s a small bowl.
I was making a triple recipe hoping for 20+ pints, enough for the coming year, plus what I had left from last year (28 pts). I got the pots going by 3PM and they had 3 hours to simmer down. About 5PM I was able to add the smallest pot to the other pots, bringing them to full again.
We’d used every big bowl I had and they all needed to be washed up.
I got the biggest canner (15 jars) heating just after 5PM. At 6PM I took the sauce pots off the stove and got the lids and rings heating up while I ran the sauce through the blender.
My husband didn’t like bits in his sauce, it had to look like Ragu sauce, so this is how I made that happen. Once all the sauce had been blended, I reheated it and got the first load in at 7:15.
My tenant went out late morning and put a couple more hours into the back pasture, weedwhacking along the fence line and checking the fence was still up.
Early afternoon my son worked his way up the left side of the driveway. We’ve got rain coming for Monday and Tuesday so nothing more will be done outside.
Tom arrived with milk and a new solenoid for the truck.
He also put a quick disconnect on the negative cable for the battery. The deal now is before one starts the truck, one puts the hood up first. That way if the same problem happens, one can jump out, pull the red wire off the solenoid and hit the disconnect hopefully before the battery is drained.
But he couldn’t get it to do it after he installed these, so hopefully that was the problem and it’s fixed. He also pulled out the dent I put in the truck door last time I got mulch hay. Now it opens more easily.
The second batch of 15 went in at 9:50PM and I went down and got my littlest canner to do the last 5 jars of sauce. I discovered I am out of regular lids but had a box of Tattlers I’d never used. So I gave them a trial run on this batch of 5.
I was using standard Ball jars, no off brands, and one of the Tattler lids caused the whole assembly (rubber ring, lid, metal band) to pull right off the jar. I had to use one of my remaining Ball lids on that jar. The other 4 seemed to be fine. This last batch started at 10:50 and finished just after 11:30PM.
When checked when cooled one of the seals hadn’t taken. So out of 5 tries, only 3 held. Not a good start.
Total jars: 36½ pints
I should have simmered it for a couple more hours as it is thinner than I’d like. But I have plenty for pizza nights this winter.
On Monday I plan to do laundry and be dead while it rains.