Salsa - Salsa - Salsa

Matt and I participate in a "community garden" which basically functions like a co-op.  We work for about an hour and a half on Saturday mornings and come home with a laundry basket full, FULL of fresh garden veggies.  Carrots, corn, cantaloupe, beets, beans, brocolli, peppers,squash, tomatoes, tomatoes, and a few more tomatoes.  Each family that participates takes a basket of produce home.  Then if there is anything left over anyone who wants it can take it.  There were a few tomatoes left over (like three 5-gallon buckets full!!) so naturally Matt brought them all home.  

This man loves him some salsa.  And so do the kids.  (I am learning.) Earlier in the summer I found a fantastic deal on a huge pressure cooker and snatched it up.  We'd used it to bottle some chicken (while I was pregnant... never again).  So we decided to learn how to bottle salsa.  

Kate was still a little Little Lady, so I got my job done first before observing everything from the couch while I nursed Kate.  Everyone had something to do.  I loved the scene and the feel of our family being together, laughing and working.  Oh, and on a side note, we have a family rule.  When cooking we wear an apron.  

In a nutshell, here is the process.  I washed all the tomatoes in the huge laundry room sink.  

 

Tyler, sporting a darling apron given to me by the sweetest sister in our ward, Xenna Boyer.  She gave it to me at my first relief society activity.  Her mother had made it and she thought I might like it since I was a new mother.  Tyler's job was to cut the stems and any unsavory parts of the tomato off.

 

Matt's job didn't really require any muscle, but he was going to use his anyway.  He makes tomato squeezing look easy, if you ask me.  Amy, looks a little less impressed.

 

Then the tomatoes were passed on to this cute little chopper.  Amy would pulse the tomatoes in the food processor before handing them off for the final step in tomato prep...

 

We still needed to get as much juice out as we could.  I had tulle in the basement as part of some Easter decorations that was just the ticket.  Enter Emily and her talent with tulle.  She got out as much of the juice as she could, saving the juice for future homemade tomato soups.