I decided I wasn’t up to another big kitchen mess, so the rest of the tomatoes are being made into sauce.  Sometimes I use my Squeezo food mill, more often I use my well loved, practically antique Champion Juicer.

I bought it about 20 years ago, and it’s still going strong.  Back then, it was the best juicer on the market.  Personally, I don’t see how they could surpass it, but I haven’t looked at juicers in twenty years.  It’ll even make peanut butter!

There’s pretty much no mess using it versus the Squeezo, but of course it takes electric… I pretty much have a non electric version of every essential item in my kitchen.

When I make sauce with the Champion, I dump my onions and garlic (unpeeled) and juice them up with the tomatoes.  The flavor is fabulous and Jim doesn’t whine about the onion chunks.  Men!   I have an abundance of basil, oregano, marjoram and rosemary growing in the garden, so this is summer bounty at it’s best!  I can’t decide if I want tomato soup… because fresh tomato soup is like manna from the Gods… or if I want to cook it down to sauce and make Mosticiolli tonight…

I planted a new squash in the garden this year.  I’ll have to dig the seed packet up to remember the name of it, but it’s an heirloom pumpkin from France.  The leaves are just gorgeous, and the plant is huge!  I think it’s about three feet tall and nearly twenty feet long.  It’s just beginning to flower.  The pumpkins are beautiful, they don’t look anything like your typical orange variety.  I can’t wait to post a picture of them when the vine fruits.

I hope to can some pumpkin this year, and of course I love it baked.  Yum!

I need to keep a garden journal.  This is also an heirloom variety… a melon I planted for Jim.  I don’t like melon, but this baby has so many flowers on it I may have to learn, we’re going to have melons coming out of our ears!