Winter is Coming

I powered through Game of Thrones, and read the first three books, and it gives me great pleasure to say "Winter is Coming" in a dramatic fashion whenever I can.

It does not give me pleasure, however, that summer is over. We barely got a summer at all here in Oregon, but regardless of how much summer we do have, I always feel an overwhelming sense of guilt when the season finally turns. I feel guilty that I didn't go outside enough, I didn't eat enough summer produce, and that I never did all get enough sun to make my hair highlight.

This year I decided to make tomato sauce to freeze to try and take advantage of the summer tomatoes, and assuage my feelings of guilt for not taking better advantage of some of the farmer's markets around town.

I'm generally not that picky about what I'm eating (in terms of where it comes from anyway). Farmer's market's always sound better when I don't have to go somewhere to get to them, and I've honestly never liked that many vegetables. I see a lot of blogs that post lovingly photographed boxes of CSA vegetables and I can think about is how much I'd rather eat McDonald's fries that a bunch of organic farm fresh rainbow chard.

(Honestly though, it's much better be the kind of person who eats nothing but organic zucchinis, then the kind of person who puts french fries on their burrito, but what can you do.)

I just really, really hate tomatoes from the supermarket. I think they taste watery and mealy. I recently read this article on CNN about how tomatoes are grown, and it made me never want to eat supermarket tomatoes again. There is a rebuttal from the tomato industry to that article, found here, if you're interested. Despite all this link posting, I'm really not trying to get into local vs. agribusiness. That's a topic for my soon to be created blog called Kristen's Opinions About Things That People Don't Care About on a Quilting Blog. I'm just trying get some super tasty tomatoes in my mouth during the winter.

So I went to the farmer's market at PSU (not realizing that it was also move-in weekend for the school) and bought 22 pounds of Roma tomatoes. I foolishly parked pretty far away and had terrible visions of the bottom of the box giving out while I walked the whole way back to my car, but I made it home with my haul and set about roasting the tomatoes.

I cut them all in half, and covered them with a little olive oil and salt.

Then I roasted them in the oven at 400 degrees for an hour.

That makes it easy to slip the skins off and spoon the guts out (oh god, why did I do this while watching Criminal Minds, I sound like a serial killer) and pop the rest into the mixer.

And voila! Tomato sauce. I didn't season it much on purpose, so I can adapt it to whatever recipe I want later.

So, twenty two pounds of tomatoes, pictured here:

Turns into 18 ziplock bags full of summer.

It would have been nineteen bags, but I had some spaghetti with tomato sauce last night, and I can tell you right now that eighteen bags won't be enough.

I guess I know what I'm doing next weekend!