During the summer we buy shares in a CSA. What is a CSA, you ask? It stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and it usually consists of paying a fee for a "share" of produce at the beginning of summer, and then the farmer gives you a weekly basket of produce for the next few months. For the past 2 years we have purchased shares with Rolling Prairie Acres CSA out of Sigourney, which is a town about 25 miles from us. The family that runs this CSA attends are church and are wonderful people. We start getting shares in late April and just got our final one for the year this past week. I love getting fresh, organic, local produce all summer long. We get berries, veggies, potatoes, apples, peaches, lots of garlic...did I mention the honey, eggs, preserves, herbs, and even yummy apple cider?
Incidentally, I recently read an article in a magazine about a year round, all food CSA in New York. It costs a couple thousand dollars a person, but you literally get all the food you need for the whole year--meat, eggs, produce, and dairy. That would be awesome! Here's a link to the article: http://www.eatingwell.com/food_news_origins/how_one_farm_saved_essex_new_york
Anyway, we get a lot of tomatoes throughout the summer. Heritage tomatoes in all different colors from yellow to orange to red to purple. I like tomatoes, but there is no way I could eat all the tomatoes we get! I like to can tomatoes, but with 2 energetic toddlers I have trouble finding time to can small batches each week, so I freeze my tomatoes in the hopes of finding the time to can a large batch! We have a big chest freezer, so every week I wash the tomatoes, then pop them into a gallon freezer bag, skin on and whole. When it is time to process the tomatoes, I either take the bags out the night before (which I rarely remember to do), or I take them out and put them in the sink filled with warm water to thaw them. When the tomatoes thaw, the skins pop right off, and they are ready to process! No boiling/cold water baths needed to remove the skin this way!
I found a recipe online to make spaghetti sauce using fresh tomatoes. I'd been looking for a good recipe, so most of the ones I found involved opening a can of tomatoes and cooking that in the crock pot to make sauce--I wanted to skip the canning step and just make it with fresh tomatoes! I mostly followed this recipe: http://www.aturtleslifeforme.com/2011/08/freezer-spaghetti-sauce-and-my-garden.html I say "mostly" because I generally don't follow recipes exactly. I didn't exactly measure how many cups of onion I put in, I estimated the amount of tomatoes, and I skipped the tomato paste...but for the most part I followed the recipe! I put all the ingredients into the crock pot in the morning, and once it started boiling I just let it cook and cook until it reached the thickness I prefer for spaghetti sauce. It took all day on "high," but I started with slightly frozen tomatoes, so that didn't surprise me.
I originally planned to freeze the sauce in plastic freezer bags, but it didn't finish cooking until late at night and I didn't want to put the sauce into the bags while it was still really hot. Instead I filled all every muffin tin I owned with sauce and put them into the freezer. I think one large "sauce muffin" or two "sauce mini muffins" will be just the right amount of sauce for a single serving of spaghetti.
Today I took all the little sauce muffins out and put them into a couple gallon size freezer bags.
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| I had sprayed the muffin tins with olive oil cooking spray, but the "sauce muffins" did not want to come out! So I employed that useful and efficient kitchen multi-tool: the hair dryer. |
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| Lots of little sauce muffins! |
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