Another Use for the Turkey Fryer

I went on vacation for a week and came back to a garden full of veggies ready to be picked. We harvested 90 lbs of tomatoes today along with peppers ,basil, onions, corn, squash, and carrots. This years total tomato harvest is well over 150 lbs so far. The pictures are 6 gal marinara sauce simmering to perfection. I can't wait for our 3rd Annual Spaghetti and Meatball night. The backyard garden is amazing as always.....I'm shocked every year at the amount of veggies we get from our 600 sq ft garden. Enjoy the pics!!!

buckeyebrewer said:

I can't wait for our 3rd Annual Spaghetti and Meatball night.

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That must be one hell of a full house if the Annual Spaghetting fest calls for 6 gal of sauce! If the volume of food is that high, I can only imagine the volume of beverage to accompany the meal.

My parents just took back their turkey fryer (my brew kettle and burner) to blanche sweet corn for freezing. I'm guessing they will keep it to do tomatoes also. I can't complain too much as it is their turkey fryer and I get some of the corn and tomato sauce. I live in the city so my roof top garden only produces enough to eat fresh.

Craig

Can you tell us some details about your garden? I just moved into a new house this year and planted a garden for the first time. I've had some success but I'm looking to improve it next year... so any tips you can offer up would be appreciated! I'd love to have a haul like that!

How about your recipe for marinara sauce?
It looks good, and im overwhelmed with tomatos this year too!
Like to make up a big suace and freeze.

Nice looking fruit ya got there. Are you like me, as your harvesting the fruits of your labor (or veggies), do wonder if you can beer out of this or that and start coming up with wild ideas? Just a thought..............

Looks tasty! My family has a great little Italian tradition where we get a bushel of tomatoes in the fall and make enough spaghetti sauce for the coming year; we cook it down into conserva and then freeze it. The entire house smells like tomatoes, garlic, and parsley for a week . The sauce you make always tastes the best, it's great to see others making their own too (we were starting to think we were the only ones left )!

I just drooled on my keyboard. Nice harvest.

Thanks for the comments...... We ended up with a house full of people last year. Probably 40-50. I made 200 nice sized meatballs and we had 13 left. Everyone brought there kids over. It was a good night.
As far as gardening tips, I think the thing that makes our garden go crazy every year is our compost we accumulate. All kitchen waste, yard waste and some newspaper goes in it. I had the compost pile started for years before we actually started our garden. So we've had plenty of good compost soil to use the past few years. This year we covered the entire garden with a 3 inch layer of compost and then tilled it for hours. We probably tilled to a depth of 12 inches which also really helped all the plants get a good start on life.

Here's my simple recipe I use for marinara sauce. This is the way we used to make marinara in an authentic Italian restaurant I used to work at. Its a great base to use for lots of different dishes.

Recipe for marinara
90 lbs fresh tomatoes
2 lbs fresh basil - washed and chiffonade
5 lbs onions - fine diced
as much garlic as you can stand to peel
sea salt
pepper

Blanch tomatoes in boiling H2O for 30 sec. Immediately put in ice bath to cool. Peel skins off, cut in half and squeeze out the seeds. Put all the tomatoes, onions, garlic and HALF the basil in large brew pot. Slow simmer it for 1 hour. Cool with wort chiller (this worked awesome.....it was cool in about 1/2 hour). Add the remaining basil to cooled marinara. Invite 50 of your closest friends over for pasta......enjoy!

The pics are of spaghetti night last year and this years garden. There were 3 pans like this full of meatballs.......damn they were good.

Awesome awesome awesome!! I just got my first house and I can't wait to make plans for a garden this spring. Adding a few hop rhizomes, grape vines and a couple more apple trees too.

I would love to see even more pics of your garden!

There was a garden. About that size already growing at the house i bought. We did a ton of. Work to the house so i didn't move in for a while, but everyone that came over to help took home tomatoes and peppers. The corn stalks were over eight feet tall but the animals got to that along with all of the ground plants thatwerent in the wire.