It must be late summer, because I’m buried in tomatoes. Buried, I tell ya! However, I am not ready to ding dong ditch bags at my neighbors’ doors… yet.
A couple of years ago I tried modifying my favorite tomato sauce recipe (2 28oz cans whole tomatoes in sauce, 1 onion (halved & peeled), 4 T butter – simmer 45 mins, remove onion—or don’t—and puree to desired consistency) to be used with my own fresh tomatoes. I knew how to peel and seed tomatoes, so I figured it would work.
Well, it didn’t! After cooking and cooking forEVER it was still more like broth and sauce. Last week I tried a tomato soup recipe from Soule Mama that I really, really loved, and had an epiphany (a small, tomato based one): roasting! The tomatoes just need a little help in the oven to be awesomely delicious for sauce.
After peeling them, I cored and halved the tomatoes, then roasted them in olive oil with some salt and thyme for 30 minutes at 400. The result when poured into the soup pot to simmer was much closer to a canned whole tomato. It’s funny how you don’t see a solution and put away a problem back in the recesses of your mind, then *poof* one day you resolve it. Sure, it’s a small victory, but when one has 5+ pounds of fresh tomatoes coming in daily and still more in my CSA share, it’s actually not such a small thing. I’m in no way mentally prepared to learn ‘real’ canning, but I will be freezing a whole lot of batches of homemade sauce to remember a bit of summer in the chilly months that lie ahead.
Oh, and do try the soup recipe. It’s really very good! I made it a second time today for us to have for dinner with grilled cheese sandwiches—I cut back the carrots to 2 large ones diced. Such a perfect pairing… mmm…
No comments:
Post a Comment