Every four or five days, another batch of produce comes in from the garden, and we have to decide how to preserve what we’re not going to eat. Tonight, I made tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes for the first time, as well as a batch of dill pickles.

Making tomato sauce isn’t too complicated. You boil the tomatoes until their skin splits and/or gets loose, then you dunk them in ice water to stop the cooking process. You can see my setup above.

Boiling tomatoes… These are mostly all romas, which I selected specifically for turning into sauce, since they have lots of flesh and not too much seed.

Issa is peeling the skins off the boiled tomatoes. After the tomatoes were skinned, we squeezed out as much of the seeds as we could. Then I used a stick blender to turn them into tomato puree. I added herbs and spices, then simmered the puree until it was the desired thickness.

Here’s Issa slicing cucumbers for pickles. We were able to fill two gallon jars with today’s harvest. We did one gallon of slices and one of spears. We have about 20 quarts of sweet pickles in the basement, so we decided to do dill pickles this time, and since we’ve eaten or given away all of the pickles in the fridge, we saved ourselves the trouble of processing mason jars and just did refrigerator pickles.

The major difference between refrigerator pickles and processed pickles is that you boil processed pickles in a hot water bath for ten or fifteen minutes. This seals the lid of the mason jar. The up-side is that processed pickles can be stored without refrigeration pretty much indefinitely. The down-side is that processing is kind of a pain in the ass. Even with my huge 20-quart stock pot, I can only process four quart jars of pickles at a time, because that’s all that’ll fit side by side in it. This means I can turn out, at most, four quarts of pickles every ten minutes, and in reality it’s maybe twice as slow as that that because the pot has to come back to a boil for each batch. Another effect of processed pickles is that they are usually softer and less crisp than refrigerator pickles.

Anyway, because we’re doing refrigerator pickles, we can just boil up the brine (vinegar, water, sugar, and salt), toss the garlic and dill in the bottom of the big gallon jugs, fill with cucumbers, pour over the brine, and toss it all in the fridge when it comes to room temperature. Easy, quick, and doesn’t involve lots of fussing with mason jars and lids.

The fruits of tonight’s labor: 2 gallons of pickles (ready to eat in about 2 weeks) and 2 pints of tomato sauce. We had considered freezing the tomato sauce, but seeing as there’s only 2 pints of it, we’ll probably just make pasta tomorrow. I don’t know about you, but I can put a cup of sauce on my pasta alone! I know that the pasta is “traditionally” the star of the show, but to me, it’s just an carrier of delicious sauce.