3 Sweet Birds: We can because we can

You read that right, it's canning season. My mother-in-law cans peaches and tomatoes that they get at a farm up where Great, Great Grandpa use to live. I have yet to tag along on a peach canning day but this is my second tomato canning afternoon since being with my Hubs.

Lulu and I drove out to her house where she was already blanching and peeling away. Once we washed our hands, we dove right in. After a few batches and lunch we started picking up and I asked her what happens to the skins. She kind of look at me weird and said she just tosses them out. For some reason I felt like there was just something that could be done with them so I took them home with me (Lulu stayed to play while the jars cooled and the MIL would drive them both over before dinner.)

I got home I started in on my search and found that many people dry the skins, grind them up and use them a lot of different ways. So TW and I started sorting our bag of left over tomato parts and pieces. I pulled out the skins, flattening them on parchment paper and scrapped away any extra meat.

TW had a blast until his belly was full.

My little kitchen co-pilot

(He found a tiny tomato that slipped past the cans)

Separating the skin from the rest of the left overs

Once I had three trays full they went into my convection oven at 200 degrees for about three hours. In the mean time TW and I continued to sort through the bag of skins and parts. I put all the extra parts in a pot and boiled it up for maybe about an hour or so then ran it all through a sifter creating tomato juice (the Hubs was happy).

How purdy is that??!

Dried tomato skins are delish as is - like fancy tomato chips - lol

When my MIL came I shared with her what I found and she was over the moon. All these years she's been tossing out all of that thinking it was just waste. Looks like I may have updated the family canning process for the better. Use it all up!