Here's something Bridget never did

Bought a bit more than 4 kilos of tomatoes at the market yesterday, which my notes told me should be about enough for five 1 litre jars. Spent a couple of hours today giving the kitchen a better cleaning than it has had for months and then set to. Water bath canner on the cooker, jars washed and waiting, boiled as well as chilled water ready and waiting. It took me another hour to get the tomatoes skinned, chopped and into jars. At least I was cleaning as I went though, which helped at the end when I didn't have a ginourmous pile of stuff to do.

For whatever reason, though, the 3.85 kilos of tomatoes that I had (after skinning and hulling) only filled 3 one litre jars. I could have quickly cleaned a half-litre jar to fill with what was left but I did the sensible thing and put that into Tupperware to have with my salad for lunch tomorrow. Don't know how it happened because I have several entries in my notebook and for all of them it worked out as about 4 kilos of whole tomatoes for five 1 litre jars. I do have a note made once that it took that many because I had chopped them rather than leaving them whole. Perhaps I was packing them in very tightly this time round. Or perhaps they weren't as juicy as before. On the one hand, it is somewhat disappointing to do all that work and only have three jars for it. Not least because the organic farmer is selling for 5.00/kg this year, which is crazy expensive. (I bought half good tomatoes and half "juicing" tomatoes, which are blemished, split ones - fine if you're going to use them immediately, you can cut out the bad parts and only 3.50/kg).

On the other hand, of course, I have three big jars of tomatoes to put away for the winter. Hooray!