Tomato Season is Here
As a Texas girl, I have a love-hate relationship with summer. Things I love: swimming, the Fourth of July!!!, picnics, long days, the overall carefree nature of summer, spontaneous trips, snowcones, watermelon, cookouts, etc. Things I hate (or at least strongly dislike): mosquitos, 100 degree + days on end, mosquitos. So maybe I mainly love summer and just really don’t like mosquitos and melting in the summer heat? BUT, one thing that I love about summer and look forward to every year: TOMATOES.
There’s really nothing quite like a fresh, homegrown tomato, sprinkled with a little salt, drizzled with olive oil and some mozzarella cheese to pair with it. Mmm magic. I think peaches and tomatoes are the two fruits (yes, fruits) that I get most excited about being in season. Probably because the out-of-season, not-from-around-here, peaches and tomatoes you get the rest of the year are hardly even the same fruit.
While flowers are what we grow to sell and make a living, the fruits and veggies at our home garden are what we grow to eat, enjoy and share with family and friends. This year, we only have 2 raised beds of tomatoes with is a sharp decrease in the amount Grant has taken on in previous years. And truly, we still can hardly stay on top of harvesting and eating them. Turns out, 20 tomato plants is plenty for 2 people— who would have thought!
The reason we grow way more than we can eat in a season is because we actually eat them all year long. Every year when the amount of tomatoes on our kitchen counter is larger than the amount we can eat fresh, we start prepping them for the rest of the year or finding recipes that use a lot of tomatoes at once. Our favorite way to do that is by making pasta sauce and freezing it in batches. We choose to freeze because it’s a lot easier and you don’t have to worry about the acidity like you do when canning. We just fill quart freezer baggies with the amount of sauce for a batch of pasta, write the date on it and stick it in the freezer. We’ll also make a batch of salsa just to enjoy that week— you could definitely go the canning route but we don’t have the time or patience for that these days.
Below I’ll share exactly how we make that pasta sauce and salsa and other recipes that are GREAT for large amount of tomatoes!
PASTA SAUCE
fill a sheet pan with tomatoes and cut out the core
place them in the oven at 400F and watch them until you see them soften and the skin starts to part from the flesh
pull them out of the oven and peel the skin off
meanwhile, in a sauce pan, saute some garlic for the sauce (don’t let it burn!)
When the garlic is golden and fragrant, add the tomatoes
cook them down for a couple hours until it become a thick sauce
at this point you can add some fresh basil!
from there, we bag up the sauce but if you want it to be a smoother sauce, you can run it through a food processor!
GRILLED FRESH SALSA
put some tomatoes on the grill with some garlic, a jalepeno and an onion
grill until soft + a little blistered
add all the ingredients to a food processor and blend away!
add some fresh cilantro, blend a bit more
strain the sauce to remove some liquid!
enjoy warm and then refrigerate for a couple days to keep enjoying!
DELICIOUS TOMATO-HEAVY RECIPES
Image from Half Baked Harvest
Image from Ambitious Kitchen
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