Classification Essay

Our vegetable garden gave more tomatoes this year than
we know what to do with. Big, beautiful delicious tomatoes.
It's now time to prepare them so we can enjoy them all
winter long. There are many ways to choose how to preserve
tomatoes, but there are only three ways that we enjoy
keeping them.

First batch of tomatoes are the diced tomatoes that we
can. Once we steam the skins off, we then cut them into
little tiny pieces, place them in mason jars and seal them
in the pressure cooker. The diced tomatoes are usually
used to mix with pasta or mix into to soups during the cold
winter days.

The next bunch of tomatoes we then turn into spaghetti
sauce. Once again the skins are steamed off. This time the
tomatoes are cut in four and put into a large cooker and
simmered overnight. The next day I start to add my spices,
onion, green peppers, hot peppers and fresh garlic. Towards
the end of the cooking period, we then add tomato paste to
thicken the sauce. Once the sauce is ready it gets put into
jars and again sealed in the pressure cooker. The sauce is of
course used to make spaghetti suppers or chop suey.

Lastly, we make the salsa. It's quite similar to the sauce,
but not cooked as long and not thickened. I add onion,
peppers, jalapeno, hot peppers, red pepper and spices. The
hotter the sauce, the better the salsa. Once again, the salsa
gets added to jars and sealed with the pressure cooker. Salsa
in our house has one giant purpose that my mother-in-law
spoiled everyone with. A night time favorite in our house,
called chips and cheese. You first place nacho chip onto a
plate, slice cheese onto the chips, then melt. Once the cheese
is melted a spoonful of salsa is placed on each chip. We
usually end up making a few platefuls before it's all said
and done.

Our garden takes a lot of time and care. The hot sun beats
down on us causing us to sweat. The dirt sticks to our skin
and the bugs won't stop biting. But even with the summer
long dirty nails and stained fingertips, in the long run it's
more than worth it to fill our house with vegetables we
grew from our own garden.