Honey Barbecue Sauce

This year we planted 6 regular tomato plants, and 4 grape/cherry tomato plants.  We had a steady supply of grape tomatoes (by steady I mean enough to eat about 4-5 tomatoes a day), but only got about 5 tomatoes total from all the other plants.  Ugh.  Our garden is not so good.  But, I had a couple bags of tomatoes in the freezer from last summer (and I thought that harvest was measly!), so I decided to make a honey barbecue sauce.

The recipe is actually for honey chipotle barbecue sauce, and came out of the HyVee Seasons magazine.  Of course, our local HyVee did not have one of the ingredients on the list: chipotle peppers in adobo sauce.  So instead I used fire roasted red peppers from a jar...thus it is just honey barbecue sauce.

All the tomatoes from last summer and this summer.  When you freeze them it is easy to remove the skins...just let them thaw and they pop right out!  Much easier than dunking in hot and cold water.

Then you boil the tomatoes, onion, peppers, and garlic for about 30 minutes.

Then you run it all through a food processor, or, in my case, a blender, and return to the pan.  Add honey, cider vinegar, and a couple other spices, and simmer and reduce for about 2 hours.  Then it is ready to can.

I spent 3.5 hours in the kitchen chopping and boiling things, and ended up with 2 pint jars, 2 half pints, and 1 mini jelly jar of barbecue sauce.  The work to output level is not great.  And one of the jars did not seal, so it is in the fridge and we will be eating pulled pork this week.  It is pretty tasty...just a lot of work.