Preserving and Home-made Goodies

As part of my quest to live a simple life I am starting to embrace preserving. There are a number of reasons for this including cost, taste and control of ingredients.

In January we went berry picking with some friends and I turned some of the fruit into jam. Luckily, I have a breadmaker that also can make jam so it was quite an easy process with yummy results. So I ended up with lots of rasberry and blackberry jam.


This weekend I really pushed myself full on into the preserving world. I purchased a box of tomatoes - over 16kgs!! I had already taken a couple of kilos out before taking the photo.

So then began the process of turning them into some useful produce. I have made both pasta sauce and salsa. It has been a bit of an effort, however, I was able to get B to help with some of the washing and chopping of tomatoes and using the mouli food mill. Yesterday I bit off more than I should have by doing 2 batches of 5kg each. Today with only finishing the last 6 kilos was much easier to manage.

Cooking happily away

First lot of pasta sauce all done.

Empty box!!!!!!!

This has been a really enjoyable (and messy) process and I'm now really looking forward to being able to enjoy the fruits of my labour over the next few months. I am actually considering going back next weekend and getting another box which should really set me up for the year.

In the meantime, tomorrow I have to decide what to do with this pumpkin and later in the week the zucchinis that are in the garden!