This summer has been an excellent season for growing. We've had a bumper crop of tomatoes. We have very badly lost count of how many we picked, but my best guess is around 50 pounds this year from our 12 plants. And last weekend, we had about 16 pounds of them sitting on our counters.

These tomatoes are Roma tomatoes that are a bit of an heirloom variety. These are great-great-grand-children of tomatoes I planted in 2011. I've selected plants that are both cold-hearty to survive Minnesota springs and falls as well those that are delicious.

STEP 1: Prep for peeling

Peeling tomatoes is not as ridiculously hard as it sounds. But removing the peels is ridiculously important when making soup, which is what we had going on that day. As a first step, we took off the tops, then cut tiny X-patterns into the bottom.

STEP 2: Peel!

This step involves a boiling pot of water, a bowl of cold water, and approximately 500 strainers and colanders of your choice. Simply toss your cut tomatoes into the boiling water and let them boil just long enough for the cut skin to peel from the heat. Once that happens, toss the tomatoes into the cold water. This will cool the tomatoes down enough so you can pull the skins off the tomatoes with ease.

In the background, you can see the lids for the Mason jars simmering to sanitize them. But more on sanitizing later.

STEP 3: Put your skinned tomatoes in a massive stock pot

This step is somewhat self-explanatory. You put the skinned tomatoes in a big honkin' pot.

But from here is where the proprietary cooking magic* happens! depending on what you are making, you add spices and other vegetables. Youngeun combined these tomatoes with onions, basil, and celery to make a delicious chunky tomato soup.

*Proprietary cooking magic is the intellectual property of Youngeun, who has an incredible talent for turning whatever she has on hand and whatever I am growing into something delicious.

STEP 4: Sanitize Jars

While all this other work is going on, we were adapting my brew kettle and its false bottom for the purpose of a hot water bath for the Mason jars. Boiling the jars and the lids creates a germ-free environment to store your food.

For those sophisticants of you not enlightened enough to own a brew kettle with a false bottom, there are pretty nice and specially designed canning boilers out there for not a ton of money.

This is admittedly a terrible photo of jars in six gallons of boiling water. But in my defense, there were six frickin' gallons of boiling water in my face.

STEP 5: Cook a really long time then pour into Mason Jars

While your tomato soup or sauce is still hot, pour it into your sanitized Mason jars. A wide-mouthed funnel and a metal ladle makes this work go by quickly. In fact, I recommend using a full canning tool set (the green trinkets in the foreground) every time you can your food. It makes life much easier when it comes to grabbing very hot items and pouring very hot liquids.

When pouring, make sure to leave about 1/2 to 3/4 inches of head space in the jars if you intend to pasteurize your cans.

Seven quarts of delicious soup stood as the end result of our 16 pounds of tomatoes.

Theoretically, these cans above would be good enough to store in a refrigerator, but we were canning for winter, and we don't really have seven-quarts-worth of space in the fridge. So there is one last step.

STEP 6: Pasteurize your jars

This is the fun part. And by fun, I mean the slightly nerve-racking part the first time you do it.

After all, it is not a natural act to boil closed jars full of food you just laboriously peeled and cooked for hours.

Loosen the screws on your lids just a little bit, because your jars are about to experience some rapid expansion of air. The lids are designed to let air out, but not in.

And boil boil boil like hell!

When you are done boiling, use your tongs to grab your ridiculously hot jars and bring them out of the water. Depending on what you are pickling, you may want to crash cool the jars in ice water. I let these cool slowly in a tap water bath.

One last step

Admire the look of pure joy on your garden gnome's face.

Hops!

2015 was a good year for growing things in Minnesota. We had periods of rain, periods of sun, and it was generally warm. What made this year especially good was that it was generally only cloudy when it rained. So the clouds did not often get in the sun's way for no good reason.

My hops plants were no exception to the positive 2015 trend. And I wanted to share some of the photos Youngeun snapped of me and the hops during part of the hops harvest this fall. She has a great knack for getting me and the hops from only the best of angles!

Taking a step back, I grow hops to use in my own homebrew. (When I am not writing on the weekends, I am often brewing.) I grow two types, Cluster and Cascade. The images you are seeing are of the Cluster variety.

Cluster hops are the first variety of hops that were able to survive in North America. As such, they were the primary bittering agent in most pre-prohibition styles of beer. And I am fond of bringing 17th, 18th, and 19th century recipes back to life with these Cluster hops.

Now, every fall, usually in late August or early-to-mid September, it is time to go out and pick the hops. Here's the pics:

Yes. That is a laundry line repurposed as a hop wire. And there is nothing better for picking hops than a cardboard box tethered to your neck with some jute twine.

Tiny scissors make the work go by nicely. The hops can really wind up around each other.

And after about an hour of picking, here was the end result:

Hops do need to be dried before you can store them, so I created this contraption out of the card board box that brought me my first shipment of Slow Boil Rising books.

As the saying goes: Reduce, reuse, recycle, and poke lots of holes!

Lastly, but not leastly, a picture of the lake, just because it was pretty that day.

Tiny blueberry bushes in their first year in the foreground. The lake in the background.

From the garden to the cellar: How to can your tomatoes