How to Turn Green Tomatoes Red and Freeze Them For Later

Back in this post, I briefly shared with you that I was going to put all these green tomatoes from my garden in brown paper bags to turn red.

 

Well... after they sat all nice and closed up in those brown paper bags in my pantry for about three weeks, they looked like this.  Nice and red. 

But I had so many of these newly reddened tomatoes that I needed to freeze most of them right away before they went bad.

Maybe you've frozen tomatoes before.  But just in case you never have, here is how I did it:

First, I rinsed them thoroughly.

Then I chopped off the stems.

After all the stems were cut off, I fit as many as I could in my blender.  

(I had a lot of tomatoes, so I couldn't fit them all in at once.  Those little guys had to take shifts.)  

I chopped some of the bigger tomatoes in half before I put them in, just so they would blend easier.  I pureed the tomatoes for just a few seconds.

Then I poured my pureed tomatoes into a colander to get rid of some of the tomato juice.  Not all of the juice, just some of it.  I wanted my tomatoes to be more of the consistency of a can of diced tomatoes, rather than tomato soup.  :)

I scooped approximately two cups of pureed tomatoes into quart size freezer bags and put the bags in my freezer. Two cups is the perfect amount for a lot of recipes.

I can't wait to pull these tomatoes out this winter when I want to make homemade chili or spaghetti sauce.  For some reason I always thought freezing any produce from my garden would be really hard. But I quickly realized that it's not hard at all.