BBQ Sauce

Today might be another lazy day around the house...........we've managed to eat breakfast, clean up a little of the kitchen/living room, but that's about it........and i'ts almost noon......hm........we should probably get outside sometime this weekend, but this is like the first weekend we've had nothing really going on, so it's kind of nice to be a bunch of bums....

So yesterday I decided to use some of the tomatoes in my freezer and make BBQ sauce. Normally I wait until Jessica can come over before doing any canning, but my freezer was getting pretty full, and it'll be a few more weeks before we can make salsa or spaghetti sauce, so I had to do something. So I took out 20 pounds of tomatoes, peeled them (put frozen tomatoes in a bucket of warm water for a little bit and the skins will just fall out), then I cut them in half, squeezed them & put them in a large pot. After that I got all the seasonings together and mixed that in. I followed the recipe pretty closely, just used a little bit more of the hot sauce & cayenne pepper to make it more spicy. After that you let it simmer for awhile (I did it for about an hour), then you run it through a food mill (thanks Carol for letting me use yours). According to the recipe you can put it in a crock pot for about 2 hours to cook it down....I did it for over 4.5 hours and it still seemed a little to thin..... but after starting it at about noon, and it was already past 9 o'clock I decided to just process the jars anyways. I'm hoping after they sit for awhile they will thicken up a little bit more......only time will tell I guess. I normally love the website that I got this recipe from, but I think they need to proof-read this one again..........it's pretty contradictory...........in one spot it says 15 pounds, in another it says 25 pounds.........so I used 20 (I was using quit a few Roma tomatoes which are thicker anyways). Also in one spot it says 4 pint jars, but in another it says 7.............I ended up getting 9.5 pints..... I think if I do this again, I'll let it sit in the crock pot over night to hopefully get a little more thick. I'll let you know in a couple of weeks when we try it what my final judgement of this recipe is.