Salsa Production and Quilted Daisies

It’s amazing how much I can accomplish when my schedule isn’t being fractured into a thousand pieces. I started on the tomatoes yesterday. The husband goes through a quart of salsa a week. He puts it on his eggs every morning. I made 52 quarts last fall and we are almost out.

Every freezer we own contains frozen tomatoes. I pulled the ones out of the freezers here in the house, first, and dunked each tomato into hot water, which makes the skins slip right off. The tomatoes went into big pots on the stove to cook down.

I have a friend who has a very specific salsa recipe, right down to the varieties of tomatoes he uses. I am not that particular. My tomato sauce and salsa consist of whatever varieties of tomatoes were in the garden that year, although I do try to go heavy on the paste tomatoes. This year’s batch contains Oregon Star, Purple Russian, and Amish Paste tomatoes along with Cherokee Purple, Aunt Ruby's green, Weisnicht's Ukrainian, Abe Lincoln, Dirty Girl, some unknown orange ones, and Dr. Wyche's Yellow.

While the tomatoes were cooking, I worked on a quilt. This is one I started quilting last spring, so it took me a while to figure out where I was in the process and what I was doing. If I ever get back to publishing quilt patterns (who knows), this will be the next release. I’m keeping the quilt for myself in any case, so I am not being too fussy about the quilting. The design is a hook swirl surrounded by a flower made with Amanda Murphy’s Every Daisy set:

Those daisies are not easy to quilt. The template is only about 2” across and hard to hold onto while also moving the quilt sandwich. I like the overall look, though, and the quilting is going relatively quickly. The center of the top should only require another couple of hours to complete. I haven’t decided how to quilt the borders yet.

I let the tomatoes cook down until mid-afternoon, then turned off the stove so I could run up to the church for a meeting with our transitional pastor. She has been working on the Christmas Eve service and I agreed to help her. I love what she has sketched out so far. She is very creative and isn’t afraid to suggest new ideas. My job is mostly to help her sort out the details.

By the time I got back, the tomatoes had cooled off enough that I could consolidate them into the roaster. Sometimes I will put the pots outside on the porch overnight, but it was supposed to get down to 15 degrees last night and I didn’t want to deal with frozen blocks of cooked tomatoes this morning. They stayed warm in the roaster overnight. I haven’t decided yet if I am going to run them through the food mill or not. The tomatoes disintegrated pretty well while cooking down. Either way, I’ll chop the onions, peppers, and garlic and doctor up the salsa to taste, then fill the jars and process them. And while I do that, I’ll probably have another batch of tomatoes cooking down.

This is only the beginning. I still have two freezers full of tomatoes out in the garage. I’ll do 50 quarts of salsa and make the rest of the tomatoes into plain sauce. If all goes according to plan, I should be done by the end of the week.

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Some time today, I also need to make a coverstitch sampler to have on display at the quilt store for my class in February. That sampler will require several changes of thread and needles to demonstrate all the coverstitch options. I’m still trying to chase down specifics on coverstitch needles. Most manufacturers specify ELx705 needles. However, several serger teachers whose opinions I respect have said that they don’t think that is a hard-and-fast rule. Also, I just discovered recently that there are two types of ELx705 needles. The ELx705 needles with the SUK designation are supposed to be more suitable for knits, although there is nothing in my coverstitch manual about using one versus the other. The manual only specifies ELx705. I am going to get some of the SUK needles and see if they make a difference.

Coverstitch machines are by far the most finicky of the machines I’ve used. They are relative newcomers to the domestic market, which partially explains the lack of accumulated knowledge on how to use them.