Making Tomato Sauce

The tomato plants in the orchard are doing really well and Lisa has been busy canning tomatoes for a couple of weeks.  I think she has at least 12 quarts of tomatoes.  The last couple of days that we have gone down to the orchard Lisa has picked big bags of tomatoes which meant more canning.  I am not a fan of the actual tomato but I do like any tomato by product.  With all the tomatoes that were picked it was time for some more canning.  Since I don't care for the tomato myself and I would not know what to do with a jar of tomatoes Lisa and I decided to make tomato sauce.  This way I can use the tomato sauce in my homemade spaghetti sauce.  So we found a canning recipe and it seemed very easy and it was.  We cleaned the tomatoes then put them in a hot water bath then a cold water bath and peeled the skins and cored the tomatoes.  Then we mashed them and put them in a pot.  We had to let the tomatoes cook on a low boil until they reduced about a third of the pot.  That is where we found out this easy canning recipe takes about 5 hours to reduce.  It was worse than watching paint dry because we had to stir the pot during this process.  After the tomatoes finally reduced we put citric acid, salt and sugar in each quart jar then added the now sauce into the jars.  We got 5 1/2 quarts of tomato sauce that will eventually be made into spaghetti sauce.  I will let you know how it tastes when I make the sauce. 
Our next canning endeavor will be another batch of pickles.  Speaking of pickles I posted that the dill pickles were good well the bread and butter pickles were even better.  Last night we tried the grape jelly we made and it turned out really good.  So we are 3 for 3 on our canning adventures.  Let's hope it will continue with the tomato sauce.  I will let you know!