An early morning harvest in the garden one morning this week netted more tomatoes than we could eat before they ruined so I knew I had to preserve them. I still had two items on my tomato preserving list that I wanted to get done with this year's harvest, so I chose one of them ... vegetable soup.I gathered the tomatoes and peppers from the garden and headed inside to gather the rest of the ingredients from my pantry ... potatoes, onions, garlic, leeks, dehydrated mixed vegetables and frozen mixed vegetables.
Here's how I made the vegetable soup:
Roasted this sheet pan of tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic and leeks.
While the veggies were roasting, I cut up and blanched the potatoes
When the vegetables were roasted to my satisfaction, I used my Nutri-bullet and liquified them. All the puree was added to a big pot, and I started adding water to get the consistency I wanted.
Once the desired consistency was reached, I added the potatoes and mixed vegetables and set to simmer until all the flavors had time to mel together.
After about 1 - 2 hours, I filled quart jars, added a teaspoon of salt to each and processed them in a pressure canner for 75 minutes at 10 lbs of pressure.
The pressure poundage is what is accurate for my area, check your area for the correct poundage.
I'll use the soup as a stand-alone meal with cornbread on the side or add some sort of home-canned meat to it with biscuits on the side.
Yum to both!
Since I had such a busy canning day, I decided to keep our main meal of the day simple. I reached into the freezer and pulled out some hamburger patties. Since I didn't have any buns on hand, when my hubby went to the post office, I asked him to stop at the store that's between us and the post office and pick up a package of buns. We didn't use all of the buns with our meal, so the next day I gave some thought to a meal I could put together around the remaining buns.
I looked in the freezer, saw some browned ground beef and decided that sloppy joe sandwiches along with cabbage steaks would fit the bill nicely.
(Picture: sloppy joes simmering on the stove top.)
(Here's a picture of the cabbage steaks seasoned and ready to go in the oven for roasting/baking.)
We don't keep buns on hand as we don't use them very often but when we do, I want to make sure that I don't let them grow stale ... unless I need to make breadcrumbs!
What's that in your hand?
Until the next post,
patsi
She looketh well to the ways of her household … Proverbs 31:27
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That soup will certainly be wonderful to have on the shelf when the weather gets cold! One of our pepper plants has just given up and died for some reason so we harvested all the peppers on it and I chopped and froze them. It was nearly a quart!
ReplyDeleteLana, the heat and humidity has been so intense here that several things in our garden have died or produced poorly. As a result, I'm trying to be mindful of everything I can harvest out of it.
DeleteI've never heard of cabbage steaks. We've got several cabbage to use, so I'll be researching that. Tomatoes and tomato juice were canned last week. Next, will be tomato paste, and I'll also be preserving apples and pears, probably both pie filling and sauce.
ReplyDeleteLaurie, cabbage steaks are one of our favorite ways to have cabbage. I have never made/canned homemade tomato paste, do you have a recipe? Pie fillings on the shelf are so convenient when you want or need a desert in a hurry!
DeleteIt will be my first time making tomato paste! I'm using Jackie Clay's recipe from Growing & Canning Your Own Food:
DeleteTomatoes
Salt
Bottled Lemon Juice
The easier recipe, which is what I'm trying, says to run the raw tomatoes through a tomato strainer (Victorio, Back to Basics, etc)). Measure and add 1/2 tsp salt and 1 tsp lemon juice per pint of puree. Heat in a large pot and simmer, uncovered, stirring as it thickens. This will take more than 2 hours. Ladle hot paste into half pint or pint jars, leaving 1/2" head space. Wipe rim, place hot lids on jars. Process in boiling water bath canner for 35 mins.
This made me smile from ear to ear. I ended up with a gift of 27lbs. of Roma tomatoes. This was from a neighbor that received them from a local farmer. She didn't feel like "dealing" with them and said she knew I would use them. After thanking her, I immediately set to making tomato marmalade (I had lemons and oranges on hand - enough for 18 - 1/2 pints), 6 quarts of roasted crushed tomato sauce and ended with a huge pot of tomato basil soup which I ended up freezing in portions for the two of us - for future quick meals. I'll be dropping off some marmalade and a quart of crushed tomatoes to her as a thank you.
ReplyDeleteRL, I don't know about you, but I enjoy being the 'mikey' of unwanted garden produce! "Give it to Patsi, she'll use it!"
DeleteWe are running short on canning jars. I placed an order on Walmart ,com and it was cancelled. So we went through all our cupboards and found an amazing number of jars that we were using for food storage. Now we have about a dozen more jars and the cupboard where we keep other misc. jars has some space for more jars!
ReplyDeleteLana, I have done that very thing when I was running short on jars! Alls fair when you're trying to preserve garden produce!
Delete