Southern Woman Adventures: Canning Tomato Soup

     To this day, I can't tell you what plain old Campbell's tomato soup tastes like. We only buy it as a base for mass-makings of soups or something like that. My whole life, we've had something better. Much better. Homemade, fresh from the garden, canned in jars tomato soup. This is one argument I'm definitely siding with the food purists on. No preservatives, no fakeness, just tomatoes, a little sugar, a little salt.

     This year the tomato crop at Larry and Barbara's (my grandparents) has exploded. We picked two buckets full Saturday, and so did about five other people my grandparents let 'borrow' from their garden. All evening long we washed, pulverized, strained, and stewed tomatoes. End result, eight quart jars and seven pint jars full of tomato soup :) Oh, and tomato soup and cornbread for supper too!

We begin! With tomatoes...lots and lots of tomatoes...

And a brand new food processor! We got this bad boy on sale for $30! I'm in love.

Washed first...

Found this little guy with a nose like Gru  O>

Chopping

I'm enjoying actually being able to properly chop something in my house again.

Molly decided she needed to help...first we learn knife skills, very very carefully, under big sister's wise teachings :) We need all ten fingertips!

Smell it? What's is supposed to smell like?

A tomato, Molly, a tomato.

The second huge bowl of quartered tomatoes we chopped

Testing out the food processor...and man was that fun! 

Tomato mush

First attempt at finding a successful strainer in the house...not successful.

This strainer is much better. The juice actually goes through the sieve!

We did end up with a proper strainer later on...much later on...but this method got us a good bit of juice.

First stewer of juice to cook!

All our tomato juice, ready to be boiled and bottled.

Almost done!!!

This stuff was hot as boiling lava!

Not a bad day for our first go at doing this, I'd say :)

I'm going to be eating happy this year.