Tomatoes & tomato herb bread

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I got a call offering me tomatoes? I was brought these two bags and that seemed like a ton to me! Then I was invited to come pick more, so I took a few ice cream buckets hoping to fill them, and came home with two huge boxes of tomatoes and peppers.


This was my first time canning tomatoes (at least on my own, maybe I helped as a kid) and I was excited to have enough tomatoes to can. Since I was baking bread the same night I was canning, I made tomato herb bread. It's my basic whole wheat bread recipe, but I used tomato juice instead of most of the water, and threw in random herbs. I think I used dried onions, parsley, basil, and rosemary. Nathan tells me it's good.




Alas, chopping peppers + cracked hands = an extremely painful night. I mixed up the last of the powdered milk (right in the can, why wash another container?) and alternated soaking my hands in that and ice water. The only way I could sleep was to soak a dish towel in ice water, wrap it around an ice pack, and keep my hands wrapped in the towel or pressed against the ice pack. I was awakened multiple times in the night by burning pain when I stopped touching the ice pack.

Spaghetti sauce - 7 quarts
Tomatoes - 13 quarts
Salsa - 7 pints

Plus lots of tomatoes and some spaghetti sauce eaten, 2 quarts tomato juice frozen, and 1 quart tomatoes that failed to seal.