Aunt Rose's Soup Stock

Friday was soup stock day on BRSK Farm.

A few years ago my Aunt Rose visited and left us a jar of her home canned soup stock and it was delicious. This summer I asked her for the recipe and she shared with me.

I picked tomatoes in the garden and really wanted to use them, but I really didn't want to fight with the lumps and bumps during the skin removal. Now if FabHub were home to do the skin slipping I probably would have used them, cause he is our resident expert on that process. He was at work though (Yay!). So I didn't use them. They are kinda pretty though.

Instead I heated these local produce store bought tomatoes. Very nice, smooth, round, and easy to get the skins off of for the soup.
These onions did come from my garden. Chopped and in the pot first.
The carrots and corn are not home grown either. Lest you think they might be, I didn't even try growing them this year.
Peas either. Maybe next year the garden will sprout these colors. This year - PictSweet provided the small vegetables.
The tomato water did come from my garden. Maybe. I did get some tomatoes to SJ from a friend. But they were grown in this county!
Cabbage - I grew some, but only got a couple of good heads out of the garden. They went into cole slaw. This is from the store too.
After most of the vegetables are in the pot I stirred vigorously before adding the tomatoes.

At this point I was concerned that because the recipe didn't call for peas and my tomatoes were kind of big, maybe I should add some more tomato water. But I didn't.
After adding some of the tomatoes I added the salt and then stirred some more.
Then the rest of the tomatoes went in.
Then I remembered I needed to add celery. So I got it diced up and dumped in the pot.
More stirring and realization that the salt was drawing moisture from the cabbage and the juice from the tomatoes was now in the pot. Glad I didn't add any juice.
Then I put the top on the pot and waited for it to boil. Once it was boiling I let it simmer for an hour, which gave me time to deal with the SJ in the background.
After the simmer hour, I loaded the soup into nine quart jars and two pints. I ran out of quart jars for the moment, but I had pints available so I filled them up.

When everything was ready I put seven jars in the pressure cooker and waited for steam.
Then I waited for jiggling. By the way, Can you tell I got a new range hood? The other one was old, a complete pain to clean (getting upside down and dripped on is not my thing), and came down a lot closer to the stove top. Now I need to paint those two inches on the wall. OR - a mosaic back splash would look nice all the way around the counter top. Need to think about that some more. Maybe get those under counter lights installed too. Okay back to the soup.
75 minutes later and time for the PC to depressurize and I had jars of soup stock.
It looks very tasty. I had one quart jar that didn't seal so looks like dinner on Saturday will be soup. Oh, I should get out the hamburger. Might be helpful. I will probably use regular water in it during preparation though. I was thinking of using more tomato juice, but that would be three jars in here. Next time I make the soup I might just use one juice and one water to can and then a jar of juice to cook dinner.

Speaking of juice. I took the cuttings and skins from all the vegetables in the stock and added the lumpy tomatoes to them in the SJ. Then juiced them down into four quarts of beautiful golden vegetable juice. Unfortunately I was tired of tomatoes and needed to get to town before the optometrist closed. The pigs will have a tasty treat from that pulp.

By the way, what is that lurking behind the soup stock?