Summer Sauce

I had a few ripened tomatoes, and a bag of frozen tomatoes tucked away, and it's been cool, so I thought I'd use the oven to warm up the house and make a batch of tomato sauce.  I went back and read through some old posts from one of my favourite blogs, Throwback at Trapper Creek.  And then I got creative.

I chopped all of the tomatoes that had started to turn orange, a couple of green ones, and the bag from the freezer.  I added a bunch of green onions that had been lingering in the fridge too long, carrots and tops, swiss chard, nasturtium flowers and leaves, lettuce, cucumbers, a few peas, and a pumpkin.
 
After roasting a few hours at 250°F, it smelled delicious- like a big pot of cabbage rolls. 

 
I pureed it and brought it to a boil on the stove top, before filling sterilized jars.  I pressure canned it at 15lbs of pressure for 90 minutes.  I figure it's safe, since the pumpkins aren't actually ripe yet, so more like a summer squash than a traditional pumpkin, and not the only ingredient.

I left enough out for supper- a big pan of rice and ground beef cooked in the summer sauce with a bit of tomato soup served as sauce on top.  Delish!

A few days later in the grocery store I found four 3L baskets of roma tomatoes on the cheap rack for $1.99 each.  Well, how's that for timing?

I have to say, I don't know why they were on the cheap rack, except that maybe the produce guy was planning on making a little sauce himself.  I only found one bad spot on one tomato out of the whole lot!

We had our first frost on Friday, so I harvested a bunch more young, small, under ripe pumpkins, along with all the garden veggies and a few dandelion leaves.

Algonquin Pumpkin

Once washed and chopped I had enough to fill two and a half roasting pans of summer sauce.  Canning today!

(As always, my blog is the story of my life, not a how-to on living yours.  Can pumpkin, or anything else, at your own risk!)