Tip Tuesday

We have a bounty of tomatoes from our garden, my In-Laws garden and some from our neighbors garden....they are piling and piling up on my counter!!  I used quite a few of them last week to make homemade tomato sauce and I freezed about 4 containers of it, but I still have A LOT more to use up, not to mention the other bounty still in the garden!!

The idea of canning them seems daunting to me at this point, only because I don't have as much free time on my hands that I used to.  Also, making more tomato sauce and/or preparing the tomatoes seemed daunting to me, as well!  I wanted to find a way to preserve them without having to do much, if that was even possible!!

Well, I found out that it is!!!!

After my extensive research on the Internet, I found out the EASIEST way to preserve your tomatoes without really having to do anything to them!!!  Here goes:

1.  Wash your tomatoes.

2.  De-stem them.

3.  Place them on a cookie sheet.

4.  Place your cookie sheet in the freezer and freeze them until they are rock solid.

5.  Place them WHOLE into freezer-safe ziploc bags and put them back into the freezer to store.

IT'S AS EASY AS THAT!!!

The cool part is that when you're ready to use them in soups, stews, sauces, etc, all you do is pull out a bag, put them in a collander and run some water over them for a minute or two.  Once you do that, the skins will literally FALL OFF!!  Then, all you have to do is chop them up and cook away!!

I was sooooooo excited to have found this information and I'm even more excited to be able to use all my tomatoes without having to take a lot of time to do something with them now!