Tomato Juice.  Tomato juice is a labor of love.  And since I love my husband and I love Bloody Mary’s I make homemade tomato juice.  This year however was different.  My good friend, Amanda, suggested we have a canning date and put up juice together!  What a lovely idea!  It was so much fun and seemed much easier with 4 hands working toward the same goal.  I arrived at her house before she did and took a moment to appreciate her wicked organization skills.

They’re labeled. LABELED. Like with real labels, not masking tape with the contents scribbled in black sharpie. Ahem.  I love you Amanda but I don’t like you right now.

She even had the book laid out and waiting…..we were gonna do ‘raw packed tomatoes with no added liquid’ but we were to tired at the end of the juice making.  Well, I was anyway.

So we began by quartering up and coring the tomatoes my husband and step-son lovingly plucked from our friends field the previous day.

Which we then smashed and brought to a boil.

I’d like to point out here that I want Amanda’s red pot with the really awesome handles.  See, the one in the front there?  She got it for FIFTY CENTS at a garage sale.  If it disappears I swear I have NO idea where it went…

Now we run all the tomatoes thru the food mill to remove the skins and seeds.

Go first one way……

…And then the other.

Until all the juice is extracted.

Now you have juice and scraps.

Scraps make chickens really happy.

So while we let the juice return to a boil we took the scraps out for the chickens.  It was like chicken crack.

They LOVED it.

Now that the juice is boiling and the jars are sterilized and hot time get to canning!

We added the lemon juice and salt before pouring in the juice….

Ta Da!

Pretty, isn’t it?

Now who wants a Bloody Mary?