Giant Totos

After we got home from Jasper on Monday afternoon I went into a weird cooking-mode. In other words, I made a mess on the stove and filled my recently-emptied sink with dirty pots & pans, muffin tins and a blender.

At one point I had every burner going, along with the oven! What the!? Who is this woman!?!?

I made dinner (turkey sauced spaghetti-it was only meh), muffins, soup, and a couple batches of tomato sauce.

For the tomato sauce I used my grandpa's tomatoes. I went over there Friday morning to help him pick the rest of his crop before the frost set in. They left on a month-long "gambling tour" on Saturday, so he wanted to pick them all so they wouldn't go to waste. Now, my grandpa is 80 and not in the best of health, but he can still get out there and garden like the young kids! He has probably a dozen tomato plants in his yard, and they were all full of tomatoes in varying stages of ripeness. And they are huge, let me tell you! Just check out the photo below. I used a CD to demonstrate the size of this badboy...and this isn't even the biggest one I got! There were about 5 green ones hanging off one plant that were all this size! I brought all of those home, and am hoping to get some "fried green tomatoes" cooking this week.

Did I mention I don't even like tomatoes? Like, to eat raw on their own (eeww!). But I love cooked tomatoes! I diced up all the big ones, stewed them in a small saucepan with some olive oil and garlic (I just throw the whole clove in), then blended them up. It makes a really watery sauce that I plan on adding to some tomato paste for pasta and pizza sauces. I froze two cups in a "medium" freezer baggie. If you lay the bag flat while it freezes, it takes up way less room in your freezer and is way easier to stack or "file" with other soups and sauces. This is a super easy food-DIY, which is kind of essential for me, as I am such an idiot with food...case in point...

"Funny" story: I went to pop all the cooked muffins from the tin and noticed that 2 or 3 of the ones in the middle of one tray were super burnt on the bottom. Weird, but nothing more. Then I grabbed a plastic storage container for them and set it down on the stove. The smell of burning plastic hit my nose right away and I rushed to pull it off the burner...which was still on! I must have knocked the knob when I was messing around with the soup on the opposite burner. That's why my middle muffins were burnt! I put the whole muffin tray on the stove, over top of that burner, to cool. I'm an idiot!!

I'm coming back this afternoon with a VLOG...excited!!