Preparing tomatoes for freezing?

[jgenie]

I bought a box of tomatoes from my CSA and now need to figure out what to do with it. I split it with a few friends but would like to freeze most of my share to use this winter. Any have a favorite easy recipe for spaghetti sauce? Anyone have any helpful hints for freezing tomatoes? TIA

[Smillow]

In the past I have pureed the fresh tomatoes in the blender (skins, seeds & all) and then cooked down for hours into a sauce/paste. Then I put it into quart sized freezer bags and laid them flat on a cookie sheet in the freezer to freeze solid. HTH!

[Moneypenny]

If I'm low on time, I just freeze them whole. I rinse, cut out the stem and throw them in a ziplock. When you need some, just run the frozen tomato under hot water and the skin slips right off. Throw them in your pot of chili, soup or whatever and they cook down just fine.

If I have a little time, I take the fresh tomatoes, dunk them in boiling water to remove the skins, then chop and freeze in 2-cup portions (like a can of diced tomatoes).

If I have lots of time, I make marinara, pizza sauce or enchilada sauce and freeze it. That would be the ideal because cooked down tomatoes take up much less room than frozen whole tomatoes, but I will confess that my freezer currently houses no less than 12 gallon ziplocks of frozen whole tomatoes at the moment, lol!