Roasted tomato sauce

This weekend, from the tomato deluge, we pressure canned 5 and 1/2 quarts of roasted tomato sauce to be stored away until we need a taste of sunshine in the depths of dreary winter. Not as much as I had dreamed of, but such is the life of a gardener.

I cut the tomatoes in half and drizzled them with a bit of olive oil. I added a couple of peppers, some onion, and 6 cloves of garlic, and roasted the pans in a 400 degree oven until they were soft. Since most of my tomatoes were not paste tomatoes, they were pretty juicy, so I then transferred to a stockpot to thicken a bit, then we put the whole kit n' caboodle through my tomato press.

The resulting sauce was still pretty thin, so I cooked it down a bit more overnight in my crock pot. This morning I canned the results in my pressure canner. We had a smidgen of leftover which we sampled today at lunch. In a word, yum.

We still have lots of green tomatoes on the vine, and with the balmy fall we've been having, we might get enough tomatoes for another batch of sauce. I wish I'd weighed the tomatoes before I started so I knew how many pounds I used for this one batch.

The plan for next year? A tomato-growing contest between Dan and I --maybe that will inspire us to try harder, thus leading to increased yields.