preparing for canning

I just weighed up my tomatoes and hot peppers - I have 15 lbs of tomatoes and 4 lbs of peppers ready to go. I need to pick up some lemon juice or citric acid tomorrow at the store and the I'll get going on the canning. It should make about a dozen jars of tomatoes. I'm following recipes from the Ball Home Preserving Book: Crushed Tomatoes and Pickled Hot Peppers.

At the other end of the kitchen, my dehydrator is humming away. I have a tray of Thai hot peppers and a couple Flaming Flare peppers drying. They need a couple days to dry.

A few days ago, I cut up another 10-15 lbs of tomatoes and dried them down in my dehydrator. I used a nice recipe that I found on line at Food.com: Make Your Own Sun-Dried Tomatoes: Oven, Dehydrator or Sun. They came out fantastic. My husband puts them on his fried eggs, chicken sandwiches and eats them straight up.I was in a hurry as they finished up and haven't put them in olive oil yet. They're just in a baggie in the refrigerator. A good task to finish up tonight.