I love this food preservation stuff!!

Today, we have gone to our homeschool group and come home, had lunch, put Pooky to bed and peeled a bushel of tomatoes.

Tomorrow we are making a pasta sauce to jar and seal and put away. I will post the recipe right now, below, so I don't have to tomorrow!

Also, a friend from our church, yesterday, gave us a food dehydrator (it is like this one, but a 10 tray instead of 5). I am so excited!! So today, we have peeled, cored and sliced apples, peeled and sliced bananas, and sliced and pitted peaches!! They are in there right now. It is so awesome to be able to do this also. The kids are so excited to have the dried fruit as a snack tomorrow. You can also make fruit roll ups with this too. Apparently you just spread some applesauce or whatever, over the plastic sheet and turn the machine on. It comes out like a rollup!! Very cool. I can't wait to try out everything I can do with it!!

So far we have in our pantry we have 6 pints of chili sauce and 10 jars of grape jelly. After tomorrow we will also have 12 quarts of spaghetti sauce, plus some dried fruit that we are going to put away. I want to make some granola cereal from Owlhavens blog and the dried fruit would be perfect!! We also will be doing some applesauce sometime during the coming week. Not sure how much we will have of that.

I am just wanting to start small this year. Get the hang of doing this and then next year add some more stuff to the process. My dad has already told me that he will teach me how to make his bread and butter pickles next year. I love these pickles they are the best!! I also want to do pickled beets, and maybe some other fruit! We will see...

This is from the same cookbook as the last recipe:

Spaghetti Sauce for Canning (makes 12 quarts)

Cut up in pieces:
3/4 bu. tomatoes, unpeeled (I peeled them cause I don't have a food mill)
3 large sweet potatoes, peeled
2 bunches celery
3 sweet red peppers
1 hot pepper
8 medium onions
3 cloves garlic
Cook together in large kettles for 2 and a half hours. Put through food mill (which I am not doing;-)
Add:
1 1/2 cups sugar
2T. salt
1 cup oil
Heat again to voiling. Pour into jars and seal. Process in boiling water bath 3/4 hour (I haven't done any of this with the other things I have done, thanks Xangelle!!)