Making Spaghetti Sauce

I've been busy processing a large pile of homestead grown produce for use in various sauces. The best method I have found requires some freezer space, so it is helpful to manage your butchering to accommodate the homestead schedule. So, for this time of year, you should be getting close to seeing some shelves in your deep freeze(s) which you will want to fill with produce as a safety valve against a deluge of garden goodness that threatens to overwhelm you to the point food starts going bad either in the garden or in your kitchen/processing area.
Peppers, especially, are simple. You merely have to cut them into strips as you core and seed them (wearing gloves) and pack them in zip lock bags. Simple enough. There they are, ready for use in a salad, on a pizza, or to use in a sauce, which is where mine are destined. If you have the freezer space (I do not this year, which is a good problem to have), you can just wash your tomato's, remove the stems and any bad spots and freeze them. When you want to use them for a sauce you run them through a food processor, then through a colander (not a strainer, a proper colander with a crank handle) in order to remove the seeds, if those are a problem for you. The cone shaped device with the wooden pestel is also a good implement for removing seeds.


The seeds in a sauce or chili, etc., do not concern me, but they do some folk, especially those with false teeth, where the seeds will get under them and cause a lot of discomfort. Regardless of whether you go to this extra step of removing the seeds or not, my method certainly eliminates the unnecessary and laborious process of blanching tomato's to remove the skins. Again, if that's what you want to do, you don't need my permission, but it seems senseless to me when the food processor turns the skins into puree, but, whatever. To each his own. The recipe I use, which is from the Ball Blue Book of Canning, calls for various amounts of tomato's and peppers, onions, etc. Their recipe mixes the requirements for tomato's by weight and the rest by cups, chopped. But by weighing out various product, it seems to me the general amount for this recipe is 4 parts tomato to 1 part 'something else'. That something else may be a combination of peppers, onions, garlic, what-have-you that you think might be good in spaghetti sauce or that your garden is throwing at you in such quantities that you are desperate to find a use. Maintaining this proportion is important as I will have to pressure can my sauce and this requires a combination of pressure for a certain period of time and varying the recipe causes changes in the weight/time calculation of canning and it's best to keep it simple. So I prepare a large variety of recipe items that will go well in marinara sauce (50 qts/year/2 person family), chili (25 qts), or sloppy joe mix (25 qts). Then, as the tomato's come off, I can process the tomato's, grab the proper amount of onions, peppers, etc. that I want in my sauce, put in the spices and pressure can the whole tomato output of a day in one step.
So goes life on the homestead today. Happy saucing.