Homemade and Homegrown, Part 1

I'm excited to be posting here and sharing some of our family's adventures in food! We live on a tight budget, but I still try to serve up the freshest, most wholesome and delicious food I can. Our dream is to someday be able to produce most of our own food, from beef, chicken, eggs and milk to veggies, fruits and berries. I really want to learn how to make cheese, too! But for now we are taking baby steps towards our goal of all homemade and homegrown food.

Last Saturday consisted of two such baby steps. The first was all about tomatoes. I had four tomato plants this year, each a different variety. Two did well, and the other two did just okay. The harvest is winding down, but I still had some tomatoes I needed to use. Then, Friday night a good friend brought me lots of extra tomatoes from her parents' garden! Score! So Saturday I set to work. Here's what I started out with:

Romas, golden mamas and half the cherries from my garden, the rest from Heather!

I cut the cherry tomatoes in half, quartered the medium-sized red and yellows, and chopped the large tomatoes in roughly equal sized pieces, cutting out the tough stem areas along the way. Then, I tossed them with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt and spread them out on baking sheets. When I ran out of baking sheets (or room for any more in the oven!), I used a glass 9x13. This worked well for the larger tomatoes, as they were pretty juicy - I didn't really want tomato juice all over my oven. I threw a couple cloves of garlic on each baking sheet as well.


I roasted them at 225 for 3 hours, just like Mommy did for these tomatoes when she was here a few weeks ago. They came out of the oven looking and smelling heavenly.

But these weren't just for eating. I had talked with a friend earlier in the week who said she makes tomato paste with roasted tomatoes to use on pizza all winter. So I dumped all these lovely roasted tomatoes (except for a few cherries which somehow leapt into my mouth) into my food processor, along with the cloves of garlic I'd roasted with them, and pureed away.

All 3 pans of tomatoes, combined in the food processor.

After a couple pulses...

Mmmmm, doesn't that look absolutely delicious? I had a small taste, and it is really scrumptious. The rest dutifully went in freezer bags and is waiting for winter, when it will brighten up our homemade pizza (or pasta!) with its lovely summer taste.

Thick, smooth and delicious. Mmmmmmm...

A confession: There was a bag full of tomatoes sitting out on a picnic table at church on Sunday. Church members often bring extra garden produce for anyone to take. Instead of taking one or two, I took the whole bag. After all, they looked a little sad, had some bad spots, and wouldn't have been great for eating fresh. I didn't want anyone to get sick. I chopped them up and roasted them on Monday, and we had them on pizza last night. Yum.