How to freeze small portions of tomato sauce.

If you are running towards the end of the summer finish line then you know that saving time is crucial. You want to make sure you save all of your harvest but sometimes that means doing small lots of tomatoes and not huge vats for an all day canning marathon.

Small buckets of tomatoes. Easy peasy.

One of the easiest ways to capture the best of your harvest is to do a small batch of tomato sauce in your crockpot and then freeze it into small portions. I've never thought using ice cube trays was enough to be worth it..... so now I use cupcake trays to freeze-for-keeping small-ish portions of tomato sauce.

Sure you can cook down tomatoes in a crock pot!

You can easily clean a small bucket of tomatoes while making dinner and then cook them in your pokey pot overnight. In the morning just cool the sauce, give it a whirl in your blender, then pour into cupcake trays. I give the cups a little shot of cooking spray first so the sauce pops out when they are frozen.

Freeze the trays then just turn out the frozen cups of sauce and voila!

Use a blender to smooth out the sauce. The not-red stuff is just the cooking spray.

Last year I was not convinced that this was going to work at all. But it did! And it worked really well. What if you only want to make one pizza?.... Or you just need a half a cup of tomato sauce and you don't want to open a whole jar? Just grab one of these frozen wonders and you are good to go.

This year I used standard sized cup cakes and a couple trays of the huge, mammoth muffin sized trays.

A couple tips:
* Using a blender to smooth out the sauce is super fast and it makes pouring the sauce quick and easy.
* If the frozen cups don't slide right out then you can always let them sit for a few minutes. Or if you are super-coordinated you can set the trays in warm water for a few seconds and then pop them out.
* Wrap the frozen tomato cups in waxed paper so they stay separated.

That's what I'm working on today. Happy Friday everyone!