Garden heirloom tomatoes and homemade spaghetti sauce

I think I could have planted our tomatoes earlier but I am still happy with our harvest. Especially since we planted all these heirloom varieties from seeds this year. Besides lots of the little Purple Bumble Bee cherry tomatoes we had some nice larger ones.

Our big tomatoes were these Blue Beauty tomatoes. Look how meaty they are. And I can't get over the dark purple skins.

We also got lots of these Roma tomatoes. Everyday I would find more on the vine.

I used the Vitamix and some of our tomato crop to make a quick spaghetti sauce.

So fresh!

Vitamix soups

I'm learning about my Viatmix blender bit by bit. One of the most mysterious settings to me was the "soup setting". I didn't understand how it could make hot soup.

Basically it blends the ingredients so fast, the friction heats them up. I decided to use it to make one of my favorite fall soups - butternut squash. Now I did pre-cook the squash... I didn't think the blender could cook those big chunks.

I love this butternut soup recipe from Wegmans because it is easy and has just a few ingredients. Some bruchetta made from our own garden tomatoes rounded out the meal nicely.

I'm excited to try some of the other Vitamix soup recipes!

These are next on my list. Acorn Squash Soup... Broccoli Cheese Soup and Corn Chowder.

Cherry popsicles

I finally got around to pitting the cherries we picked. Cherry Chomper is cute but the four-at-a-time pitter got through all those cherries a lot faster.

I used our Vitamix and our Zoku to make cherry popsicles.

In less than ten minutes... cherry posicles! All cherry, no sugar needed.

I had a little extra cherry puree leftover so it was a good chance to use my frozen ring pop molds.

Cute and yummy!

Vitamix arrives

After many months of reading reviews and looking at different models we got a Vitamix!

I thought, how different can a blender be? Hoo boy can it. This puppy sounds like a jet engine. My old blender would start to smell like burning metal when I tried to crush ice. I was contantly scraping down the sides trying to get it to chop everything in the container. The Vitamix did a great job making these smoothies with frozen bananas, cherries and ice. Easy peasy. I'm looking forward to trying more recipes in the cookbook.