Low Key Prepping

Winter is coming. For real. The first frost has come, and except for some root vegetables and anything that is continuing to hang on inside my greenhouse, the growing season is over. Now that it is time to finish harvesting, I have a lot of work ahead of me.

What kind of work? Chopping, pickling, cooking, freezing, canning.... There is an unending pile of vegetables demanding to be preserved. I am spending long hours each day to get it done. My biggest task right now is to do something with these tomatoes.

Despite all my complaining about drought, it really is a good year for tomatoes. Of course, my greenhouse was a great help in this regard. I have already processed every tomato in this picture, and it wasn't easy. Despite my hard work, the tomatoes keep multiplying. I have been drying, roasting, making sauces, feeding everyone tomato sandwiches, making tomato salads. Really, all we have eaten in the last month are tomatoes. My husband says he is sick of them! Everyone groans when they see me slicing tomatoes around dinner time. I can't help it. I've got to get rid of them.

One of the easiest ways to preserve tomatoes is to dehydrate them. My oven has a dehydrate setting and I find that it gets the job done efficiently and quickly. The dehydrate setting is at 150 degrees Celsius and I find it dries out the tomatoes perfectly. Once they are dry, I grind the tomatoes into dust, add some salt, and then store in a glass canning jar. Not only is the tomato dust delicious and versatile, but it seems to last forever without any deterioration in flavour.

These tomatoes were sliced, dried and then ground into dust. I use the dust to add to soups and sauces during the Winter months. It is surprising how much deliciousness just a tablespoon will add.

I dehydrate a lot of my produce. The reason why is because it is easy to do and even easier to store. The best part is that when you add water, it tastes almost like fresh.

Every rack in my oven is filled with sliced vegetables or herbs. It smells really great in the house.

In addition to drying, I will freeze or can prepared tomato sauce. This makes it easy for my husband to take the sauce and reheat it for dinner.

Every sauce is a new recipe because I can't seem to follow one. Usually, I dice up whatever vegetables I have on hand and add pureed tomatoes to them. In this case, I had onions, peppers, celery, carrots, zucchini, and some mushrooms. Everything was grown in my garden except for the mushrooms as I haven't figured out how to grow my own yet. To this I add my tomatoes and seasonings. It turns into a nice rich sauce.

Another trick I have up my sleeve is to roast the vegetables before making the sauce. This results in extra delicious rich flavour. After roasting, I puree the vegetables and add seasonings.

Once my tomato sauce is done, I can either pressure can or freeze. This year I have been putting the sauce in freezer bags.

Although I am swamped with tomatoes, more vegetables are coming. I do not even want to think about the carrots and beets that I need to do something with.

I managed to get a good haul of onions and I expect there will be more than enough to get me through until next harvest. The above picture shows them 'curing' on a rack. I store the onions in a burlap bag in my garage, which is temperature controlled to 10 degrees Celsius.

Unfortunately, my garlic crop failed, so I do not have any of that. I use both onions and garlic in my recipes, so I suppose I must rely on store bought. To tell the truth, quite a few crops failed this year. There were almost no cucumbers. I did not get any beans and very few peas. The potatoes that I have dug up so far are very small. Still, there is enough food to get me through. This year, the Apocalypse can try it's worst, but I won't starve.

This is a 100% POWER UP! post.