Canning Tomato Sauce

We bought more of those knishes made by Gabriella's. We each had two last night. I went the ketchup hog way and dipped mine in ketchup. Steve always has his with butter and mustard. A good combo by the way. We also had a little Breakstone's cottage cheese.

I made batch #3 of magic tomato sauce last night. This time I left the garlic in instead of fishing it out of the olive oil. I also used a good amount of bay leaf but next time I'm gonna use even more. We spaced on picking up more anchiovies at the store so this batch doesn't have any. It's still pretty good. It's thicker than the other batches and tastes pretty good. It's a little sweeter than the others as well, though not too sweet.

To can, Steve boils off the empty jars in boiling hot water. Then he adds about a tablespoon of Real lemon juice (the kind in the green bottle) and fills it with sauce til about 1/4" from the top. Then he sticks it in the canner which is just a giant black pot with a thing that you stick in the bottom to hold the jars in place. This boils for about 40 minutes and then you're done.

I've decided that I hate the process of making sauce. It was fun for the first batch then it just turned into work. The sauce making part is the most time consuming as it takes over three hours to reduce the tomato to about half. You gotta stir like every ten or fifteen minutes. I was up the whole time pacing around worried about burning the sauce. And of course, without fail, I burned myself. Twice. Once on my fingers and hand and once on the top of my foot. I suffered. We have one more case of plum tomatoes to go. I really dread it but I guess it has to get done. Anyway, take it easy today and Eat something good!