Spaghetti Sauce and Cleaning The Stove Top

Canning season is upon us; has been for a while now.  I am finally getting to the tomato canning portion of my “want to preserve for winter” list.  The first steps I knew pretty well:

• wash tomatoes
• quarter tomatoes
• put through food mill
• cook down

The next steps were ones I had to reference past posts to find what I liked (here and here).  For some reason, this part intimidated me (I know, you can chuckle) and I put it off till late last night.  A quick search of posts brought up these two from years past.  My memory clicked and I laughed at myself, “It is so easy.  You were making it into a bigger deal than it really was.”  Story of my life right now.

So, with a few chops of onion here and dices of peppers there I had a large pot of mostly thickened sauce cooking on the stove.  What is a girl to do?  Was the dishes and sit down with a book of course.

As you can see, I still need to clean up around the stove as it splattered out while pouring it all into one big pot and while cooking.

This will be easy since I did a larger scrubbing even on the stove top earlier this week.  Nothing like cooked on burnt tomato sauce to give your arms a work out.  In years past I gave up on this, as our stove seems to turn everything that falls on the stove top into a burnt mess.  When I tackled it earlier this week I took the ‘easy’ way out:

1. Spray multi-purpose vinegar cleaner
2. Top with scrubbing agent
3. Let sit overnight

Tuns out the ‘easy’ way has been The Way to do it all along.  The burnt on food and spills wiped right up, no extra super-human arm power needed.  I have tried this in the past, but never let it sit so long.  Now I know exactly how to handle any spills that inevitably seem to happen when canning tomato sauces.

There was one spot that decided to be a stubborn.  As I had run out of cleaning powder at that point, I decided to wait until the canning of tomatoes was finished before going through Round 2.

Today I will be doing another 80 lbs, or so, of tomatoes.  If all goes as planned, I will begin canning up the sauce tonight and finish in tomorrow morning.

Update: In the end I had 27 jars of spaghetti sauce to add to my shelves.  With these and the ones remaining from last year’s canning, we will be good through the upcoming year.  I love that feeling.  :)

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