Goodbye HFCS! How To Make A Small Batch of Homemade Tomato Ketchup in a Crockpot

 We are not unduly careful about what we eat: we prefer fresh, real foods but do not insist on organic; we trust our bodies to balance our diets, rather than following elaborate prescriptive eating plans; we don't buy food processed in China, but are ok with Mexican tomatoes during the winter months (from a locavore perspective, Mexico is closer to us than California LOL!)...

Still, my husband Paul has had a growing concern about the pervasiveness of High Fructose Corn Syrup in processed foods. We've started avoiding those things that have this ingredient.  Ketchup is a bit of a problem, since most brands contain HFCS and we like our ketchup!

I'd never made it myself since most recipes are for huge batches, calling for bushels of fresh tomatoes. Not only the investment, but what if we didn't like that particular recipe? DIY is foolish if it is wasteful!  So I was pretty excited to find this simple, small batch version on Instructables.com.

The original recipe is from Instructables member Scoochmaroo. Her basic recipe is very good as it stands. I made a few adjustments - mostly, to allow it to be cooked in a crockpot, so that I wouldn't need to stand over the stove and watch it.  My recipe is below.

 

Easy Small Batch Crockpot Tomato Ketchup

2 (6 ounce) cans tomato paste (total of 12 ounces tomato paste)
1/2 cup white vinegar
3 teaspoons molasses
4 Tablespoons brown sugar
1 Tablespoon onion powder
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon salt

Mix all ingredients together in a small crockpot* and cook on low for 4 hours. To cook on top of the stove, add one cup of water to the recipe, bring to a boil, then simmer, covered, on very low heat for an hour or two, stirring every 15 minutes, until thickened. Cool, pour into a clean, sterile container, and refrigerate.

*I have a small "Crockette" that I used for this. If using a larger crockpot, I would probably double the recipe, just to give it enough bulk to cook properly.

 This recipe makes about 3 cups of ketchup (depending on how much water you add). It can be used immediately. The vinegar will preserve it, refrigerated, for a couple of weeks. I will just keep the ingredients on hand, and once a month or so will pop a batch into the slow cooker while we go about our business for the day.

We had this with our burgers tonight, and Paul said "That is some good ketchup!"  YAY! I won't even have to fiddle with the spice mix. 

It doesn't taste like "homemade ketchup", it tastes like plain old ordinary ketchup - which is, after all, what we really want on our salty french fries!

Enjoy!

The Empty Seats in the Courtroom

I had wanted my first blog post from my new computer to be a Thank You to my sweet son Nicolas and my sweet daughter-in-love Lani for presenting me with a new Dell Laptop and having my photos recovered from the old crashed hard drive. I don't think they agree with my politics but they like my recipes and the good normal life things I write about. Nick and Lani, I love you both. I promise to write some fun stuff soon.

But my first blog post on this new computer is not just gratefulness for these grown children whose lives are now bearing the fruit that was only a promise when they were born as tiny, tiny infants. So small their little hands could curl around their mothers' little fingers. So beautiful. And so much beauty and wonder and joy we have known from having them in our lives all these years as they have grown and matured and loved and become people who've exceeded their parents' happiest dreams. 

It is also a post of grief for the abortion-murdered children whose mothers will never know the joy of an adult son or daughter.  Who have been seduced into submitting to the murder of their futures by the murder of their babies.

The empty seats in the photo above are real. They are places reserved for news reporters who no longer care what is happening outside their own doors.
 
As I write, people who call themselves journalists and reporters and editors have decided they prefer to allow the Holocaust of the Unborn to continue than to mention the name of Kermit Gosnell.  They are sitting at their desks with their fingers in their ears singing "la la la la la la la" to drown out the sound of the evidence being presented in this trial.
 
People who make decisions about what stories to cover and how to report them for nearly every major news outlet in the United States have almost uniformly rejected the Trial of Two Centuries as "local news". They have chosen to continue to take the role of sycophants in a modern sacrifice of the first born.  USA Today's Kirsten Powers is one of the lone voices raised against the travesty of failure by newspaper, television and internet general media to cover this story. Mollie Hemingway, of "(The Press Doesn't ) Get Religion", has been a bulldog in confronting people at news desks with this.

The photo above is a picture of the courtroom in which the Kermit Gosnell Trial is being held. The Press are damned by their own absence. May God have mercy on their souls, because their sin of omission will not disappear just because they pretend it isn't there.

Just like little babies do not disappear just because some people pretend they don't exist.