Predicting that yesterday would be a slow day at work (and it was), I took the black beans to my office and was able to shell most of them before the day was over. My husband shelled the rest of them after he got home from work, while I was fooling with the tomatoes. All told, I had a good-sized shoe box full of shelled beans. They are in the refrigerator, waiting to be blanched and put into freezer bags when I get home today.
I started washing, scalding, and peeling tomatoes for salsa the minute I got home from work. After two hours of this, both of my hands were numb, and I'd peeled only half of them. I began to envision a l-o-n-g night of tomato processing. I tried to pawn some of them off on Nanny, but she was in the middle of making cucumber relish and did not want to think about tomatoes. Drat.
It hit me that I could cut my work in half by making tomato juice instead of salsa. While the salsa was cooking in my big soup pot, I cut up the remaining tomatoes (no scalding, no peeling) into the waterbath canner. The pot was nearly FULL of raw chopped tomatoes by the time I finished. After cooking them and mashing them through a sieve, the canner was about 2/3 full of juice. Like the beans, the juice is in the refrigerator, waiting to be processed when I get home today. I peeked in the canner this morning. The solids have settled to the bottom. Tonight when I come home, I'm going to dip the water off the top and make spaghetti sauce instead of tomato juice.
The salsa cooked down to 10 pints, and it is yummy - hotter than a firecracker, just like we like it. We'll need more than 10 pints, but there are plenty more tomatoes ripening under the tree, and a thousand more green tomatoes still on the vines.
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