My sister called on Thursday and said that we had access to some free tomatoes if we were willing to pick them. This is great news to our entire family!! We love canned tomatoes in our spaghetti, lasagna, sausage dishes...anything and everything that calls for diced tomatoes, we use our canned ones. One year we even did salsa and it was AWESOME!! So needless to say, free tomatoes was something we knew we had to jump on.
My sister, brother and I all have birthdays very close to each other, so on or around labor day the entire Schofield clan get together celebrate. Well this last weekend was the "big birthday bash".
We headed to Roseburg at about 11:30am on Friday. I envisioned a relaxing time, playing in the pool, playing the wii, eating good food, celebrating birthdays and canning a few quarts of tomatoes. By the time we got into town, we headed straight to pick our tomatoes and then to Abby's for pizza. We allotted ourselves about 45 min to pick as many tomatoes as we could. With 5 adults and 3 kids picking, it only took us 15min and all the boxes we had brought were full. We were on cloud 9 thinking of how quick it was and how many we got.
Well Saturday came and cloud 9 dissipated. We canned 120 quarts of tomatoes and 32 pints of YUMMY salsa in 15 hours. Seriously, there was never a point the entire day where one of us weren't in the kitchen boiling, peeling, stuffing, salting or preparing the jars for processing. However, Jason and I did manage to sneak in a date to see the new Borne movie....SO GOOD!!
By the time we got home from the movie, the kids were at each others throats and the adults were all tired. We each got a piece of cake, opened the presents, headed back to the hotel and fell into bed (after a bit of swimming :) ).
Sunday my nephew Gage became and Elder in the church, which is awesome. He's headed to BYU tomorrow actually, so we are super pumped for him!!
Finally we headed home. WHAT A WEEKEND.
If anyone needs some canned tomatoes, I know where you can get some :)
