Grow your own.
I harvested and processed 38 pounds of tomatoes the other night, into 6 pints of pasta/pizza sauce. It was a job made easier by this little contraption that my mom bought for me at the last Tomato Festival, but which is also available on Amazon, of course. Before this gadget, there was a whole lot of boiling water, and blanching, and buckets of cold water, and wasted water, and SO MUCH WATER and steam and heat it was unbearable. This still takes a very, very long time, but I'm so happy to not be boiling and peeling tomatoes for 10 hours that it's totally worth it.
As faithful readers of this little blog know, I grow a lot of our food and I preserve as much as I can. It's a lot of work, but it's what I choose to spend my precious and rare free time on, so I can't really complain. What I CAN complain about is the folks who think that growing our own food and canning and dehydrating and harvesting honey and making our own wine is just a fun little frivolous novelty and what I produce has no more value than 2 buck chuck or commercially-processed jars of spaghetti sauce. I don't really care if other people choose to spend their time on other things, but then they should expect to get their food at the store, and not from my garden, my fridge, or my pantry.
Anyone who wants a jar of homemade pasta sauce is welcome to put in the effort, as we have done. Start with a dustbowl that hasn't grown anything but crabgrass and junk cars in decades. Spend every spare minute of your free time on the following: turn the soil, weed, build raised beds, run irrigation lines, shovel dirt, shovel manure, shovel mulch, start seedlings, monitor soil nutrition, build hoophouses, water, stake and cage and tie, fertilize, battle earwig infestations, hand-pick japanese beetles, spray aphids, gas-bomb gophers (twice a day), build gopher cages, replant, harvest, process... repeat.
And let's talk about processing for a minute. Even with the right tools, it takes about 12 hours of processing to reduce 38 pounds of tomatoes (an average mid-summer harvest) to about 6 pints of sauce. That's 12 hours of skinning, seeding, and pureeing, and working recipe magic over a hot stove, and then meticulously canning it all so that none of the seals pop and reduce all that work to pointlessness.
So, NO, I don't freely give away all of my hard work. My time is precious. I don't get any more of it, I can't stockpile it, and when it's gone, I won't ever get it back. A few very special friends get a few select canned goods. Tomatoes and tomato products almost never leave the Hill. And anyone who doesn't like my little policy is welcome to start their own garden on their own little dustbowl. Have at it. It's Southern California. Just add water.
As faithful readers of this little blog know, I grow a lot of our food and I preserve as much as I can. It's a lot of work, but it's what I choose to spend my precious and rare free time on, so I can't really complain. What I CAN complain about is the folks who think that growing our own food and canning and dehydrating and harvesting honey and making our own wine is just a fun little frivolous novelty and what I produce has no more value than 2 buck chuck or commercially-processed jars of spaghetti sauce. I don't really care if other people choose to spend their time on other things, but then they should expect to get their food at the store, and not from my garden, my fridge, or my pantry.
Anyone who wants a jar of homemade pasta sauce is welcome to put in the effort, as we have done. Start with a dustbowl that hasn't grown anything but crabgrass and junk cars in decades. Spend every spare minute of your free time on the following: turn the soil, weed, build raised beds, run irrigation lines, shovel dirt, shovel manure, shovel mulch, start seedlings, monitor soil nutrition, build hoophouses, water, stake and cage and tie, fertilize, battle earwig infestations, hand-pick japanese beetles, spray aphids, gas-bomb gophers (twice a day), build gopher cages, replant, harvest, process... repeat.
And let's talk about processing for a minute. Even with the right tools, it takes about 12 hours of processing to reduce 38 pounds of tomatoes (an average mid-summer harvest) to about 6 pints of sauce. That's 12 hours of skinning, seeding, and pureeing, and working recipe magic over a hot stove, and then meticulously canning it all so that none of the seals pop and reduce all that work to pointlessness.
So, NO, I don't freely give away all of my hard work. My time is precious. I don't get any more of it, I can't stockpile it, and when it's gone, I won't ever get it back. A few very special friends get a few select canned goods. Tomatoes and tomato products almost never leave the Hill. And anyone who doesn't like my little policy is welcome to start their own garden on their own little dustbowl. Have at it. It's Southern California. Just add water.