A few weeks ago, we took a trip to Banks, OR, and picked about 20 pounds of cucumbers for making pickles. My mother-in-law has a truly fantastic recipe for dill pickles, and she turned the entire 20 pounds into quarts of dill spears for us. If I haven't mentioned how much I love my mother-in-law here, I probably should have.
But wait, it gets better. A week before the cucumber adventure we went to Silverton, OR (just south of Salem) and picked pears in the front yard of some of old friends of my in-laws. They had five pear trees (not sure of exact species), two of which were "winter pears". I don't know how many pears we picked, but it was enough to fill the back of a pickup with produce boxes full of them. We had to wait a while for the pears to ripen, then we all spent a Monday canning pears. 85 quarts. Eighty five! And we had plenty left over for several pear crisps (excellent, of course) and some fruit leather (pear puree mixed with reduced home-canned concord grape juice). I'm not sure exactly what we'll do with so many canned pears, but you'll probably get a first hand look right here before too long.
Today, my in-laws are once again in Banks picking up our tomato order. 150 pounds of vine-ripened tomatoes - 50 pounds for them, 100 pounds for my house. We plan to can them all. With an average of 2.5 to 3 pounds of tomatoes per quart, we should get about three dozen quarts of canned tomatoes. That's about a year's worth at my house.
I'm out of home canned tomatoes right now, but not too long ago I had plenty and this is one of the things I did with them:
Meatballs!
I started with six pounds of ground meat. In this case, I had two pounds each of ground veal, ground lamb and ground chuck that was ground at home:
I added one egg per pound of meat, along with an entire bulb of garlic (finely chopped) and some spices (oregano, basil, crushed red pepper, kosher salt & fresh ground black pepper:
Mix well:
Turn the meatballs to brown on all sides, add more as space permits:
Six pounds of browned meatballs:
Deglaze the pan with some red wine:
Add some onions:
Add the tomatoes - I used three quarts of home-canned tomatoes that I turned into a puree/sauce with a stick blender:
Ready for noodles:
I served this over linguine, and it was delicious. I served the entire office meatball sandwiches the next day, and everybody loved them.
You can use whatever meat you have, but I'd advise against using 100% beef. I made a four-pound batch last week and used three pounds of ground elk (about 10% beef fat) and one pound of ground pork. They were also delicious. I served meatball sandwiches again at work, and they were very well received.
I will be taking pictures during the tomato canning process, and will make a post here with all the details...
