MAKE SOME TOMATO PRESERVES! WE DID!

Good posts should be prefaced with good introductory remarks and background. Let me try to supply same!

Back when I was a mere boy during that awful and pervasive conflict, WWII, we were not all that far out of the depression. Times were improving somewhat, economically, but a dollar was a dollar, and they were still somewhat scarce from the 30's.

In the small Eastern New Mexico town of Clovis, we lived on a corner lot. That means a little more room for a "Victory Garden" which almost everyone had then. You could raise livestock in town in those days, and we had our own cow, chickens, rabbits, and the aforementioned garden; thus we had our own milk, butter, (meet the churner: me), and vegetables.

My Mother would buy cherries, grapes, apples, and peaches in bulk and make jellies and preserves.
And Dad, who grew up on a sandy, dry, isolated, cotton farm in west Texas near Punkin'
Center (don't look for it on a map: it "ain't there"anymore), remembered his mother's biscuits, made with hog lard ("nothing like them!"), and eaten with TOMATO PRESERVES!

We grew a lot of tomatoes in that "Victory Garden" there on the corner, so Dad used to make for himself, each year, a batch of tomato preserves. Other than to taste them once or twice, I avoided them. I mean, cherry, grape, fruit jelly was fine, but tomatoes were for hamburgers and stuff like that; they were "salty" food.

The years went by and a couple of years ago my wife and I were out at Corrales at a vegetable
market and I saw and bought one jar of tomato preserves, just out of curiosity. We ate those preserves within a week-- they were good on everything. We couldn't find anymore for sale--there or anywhere locally.

In circa 2004, wanting to grow tomatoes, but having no open space, (see two previous posts on this subject), I ordered five Earth Boxes. For all this time we have had wonderful tomatoes; you know, vine ripened. The other day, it just hit me--I'll find a good recipe and we'll use up some of these extra tomatoes--I'll find a good recipe on Henry, my I Pad, and make some jam/preserves, whatever.
See what I found:

Posted by Sarah Restauri on blog: Home Grown.org/ "Canned Tomato Jam." Look up this recipe; I like her writing, and it being copyrighted, I won't give it, other than to say it uses
tomatoes, ginger, cinnamon, salt, lime juice, sugar, and crushed chili powder. She uses
exclamation marks with recipes "only if they are tops"; and she uses one with this recipe!

We, (my sous chef and I), made a half recipe, two and one half pounds of tomatoes, cut up, seasoned, and cooked for a couple of hours. There is a lot of water in tomatoes. Not to worry,
they WILL thicken. In fact they came out really nice and thick, more like jam than preserves.
Read Sarah's ideas for using them. We put cheese spread on a Ritz cracker, with a dab of tomato jam! Wow, things DO sit good on a Ritz. We put it on eggs, meat loaf planned for tonight! I guess it could be called a thick "sweet salsa," I, being a creative male chef, have discovered the ultimate:
SWEET AND SOUR FRITO DIP!"

We are wondering how, in those cold non-tomato-growing days of winter, can we make this; even wondering about buying and using canned tomatoes. Amazon has jam now, periodically. If you find it in town, please call the writer. Oh yes, a couple more things: Sarah recommends a heavy iron
enamel-coated-interior French pot, Le Creuset; also she puts up jars (canning), which I must learn, I guess. Maybe my sous chef knows how. Our medium-sized orange Le Creuset worked great and looked great!

Try a half recipe, or even less, unless you are a wimpy-experimenter cook. Did I say: It was marvelous!!! Thanks, Sarah!

By Mil
Sent from my iPad