The great tomato sauce catastrophe of 2012

I am so happy to have discovered a good farmer’s market not too far from my home.  I can get up on Saturday mornings, make the 15 minute drive and come home within an hour or so with everything from smoked chicken to pain au chocolat to fresh tomatoes and okra.

Pain au chocolat is a dark chocolate filled croissant.

In fact, it’s become such a thing this summer that pain au chocolat (or as my husband refers to it, “the breakfast of the gods”)  is our standard Saturday morning breakfast and smoked chicken and veggies from the market is our standard Saturday evening supper.  We don’t know what we’ll do once it closes for the winter months.

Several weeks ago, I went to the market and had in mind to get a bunch of tomatoes to make and can some tomato sauce.  As it happened, one of the vendors had a box full of blemished tomatoes (which we later weighed at 15 lbs) for about $5.  PERFECT!

I got my tomatoes home and later that afternoon, the kids and I got to work cutting out the bad parts and prepping them for cooking.  I used this recipe as a guide and found it all to be pretty simple.  I used my absolute biggest stock pot and even still, it almost wasn’t big enough.

The only hitch I encountered with actually making the sauce was that I didn’t have and couldn’t seem to find anywhere a food mill. But I finally came up with a solution involving a colander and a ladle that seemed to give me my desired results.

That was the only hitch.  Until….

I had placed the hot/sterilized jars on the wire cooling rack that you see in the picture.  I filled them all.  Then, one by one I picked them up to up on their lids.  All the while, not realizing that the last row of 3 full jars were on the back edge which was beyond where the foot of the cooling rack touched the baking sheet below.  SO, when I picked up the final jar in the next to last row the wire rack finally tipped sending the 3 jars in that final row spilling all over and down the back of the range.

I cleaned up the top of the range the best I could.  Then, my hubby, saint that he is, set to work the next day….

….cleaning….

…cleaning…

… and still more cleaning.

It actually took him several hours to get all the sauce cleaned out of all the nooks and crannies in, around, and behind the range. 

I love that man!

But the result?  Did I get my tomato sauce?

Why, yes.  Yes, I did.

All told, I figure I spilled about 1 1 /2 pints of tomato sauce, but the remaining 8 pints will be wonderful come winter-time when we are desperately missing the Farmer’s Market.