catsup commitment

I learned that if you want to make catsup, you have to put some serious effort into it. Twenty pounds of tomatoes (mostly roma), slit and dipped into boiling water, skins sloughed off, squishy fruit mushed in hands to extract the seeds. For the love of god, wear rubber gloves because that tomato acid is a killer. Boil that in your enormous stock pot for 45 minutes, along with some spices. Make your eyes sting with the fumes from a separate saucepan brewing cider vinegar and more spices.

Pulp the tomatoes through your hopelessly defective foley food mill. Curse, decide to throw it out (it was bought at the goodwill and for all I know is missing some key component, a spring I think, which allows it to actually MILL the food). Put the rest of the tomatoes through the good old cone sieve (another goodwill find, missing the wooden masher which is obviously a key appendage, but I made do with a big wooden spoon).

Add the strained seasoned vinegar to the tomato-ey slop and stir. Bring to a boil, then move to the uncovered crockpot on high. The recipe suggested this as a method where you didn't have to hover over it stirring constantly. Well, there was no hovering but there was also no appreciable reduction in 4 hours. Switch to the trusty le creuset roaster! Put it in the oven, one of my no-stir tricks. After two hours, no reduction in liquid. Realize you have spent the entire DAY making ketchup and grab a tawdry but excellent used book that your lovely husband bought for you over the weekend. Realize that if you were not married you would seriously consider seducing Dan Simmons, just so that he would murmer the plotline for his next book of genius in your ear after a glass of wine. It is somehow sexy that his older work is gumshoe horror scruffy detective horror fluff. So delicious!

I digress. Read the book. Sit at the stove counter. Keep the catsup at a rolling simmer and stir every 3 minutes. Over and over and over. Eventually it is reduced! Happily, this coincides with Charlie ("the spicer") returning from work. Keep one small jar plain for future reference. Allow your husband to go crazy with the adobo sauce in the rest, spicy spicy.

Twenty pounds, one day later: catsup. Several precious jars.

Also: One hefty jug of fresh tomato juice. What to do! Well, make The Best Bloody Mary In The World, of course. Secret ingredient: Penzey's english prime rib rub.


Also: turkeys are growing slowly. Their whistling in the kitchen makes me happy. The larger is named Babs, the other as yet un-named.