Tuesday, September 22, 2020

You say tomato, I say enough already.

 I processed more tomatoes today, and have a few recipes for using up the green tomatoes if they don't ripen.

I chopped up green peppers for the freezer. I love to have chopped peppers and onions in the freezer. If I'm using them in a recipe, I just grab a couple bags from the freezer, slam them on the table and then scoop out as much as I need from the onions and the peppers and then zip the bags back up and toss them back into the freezer. 

I made a cucumber salad for Tim, summer's last hurrah. I don't know how it will go with the pot of soup that I've got simmering to use up another summer squash and a zucchini. Pretty much a mishmash supper of vegetable produce. It's chilly here, in the mid sixties. 

Today I went to my friends house. She was giving me her raspberry suckers. While we were digging them,  she said, "Do you guys eat cherry tomatoes?" She led me to a tomato 'tree' for lack of a better word. The thing was 6 feet tall. Too wide to wrap your arms around. Amazing thing, loaded with cherry tomatoes.  They got the plant from their Amish neighbor. I made up my mind to save some of those seeds for next year. 


I've got the pulp fermenting right now. I'm intrigued that you can check the seeds for viability before putting them away. There's a lot that I don't know about saving seeds, but this seems pretty straight forward. 

I brought 4 quarts of cherry tomatoes home from that plant, and there are easily twice as many still on the bush. Just amazing to me. I honestly have never seen anything like that. In any case, as we picked, Mary said, "We've had so many of these that we're both just sick of them."

I have a notion that before this is all said and done, I'm going to be heartily sick of tomatoes myself. I'm not quite there yet though. 

She told me an interesting thing that I did not know. The Amish take the late season green tomatoes and wrap them individually in newspaper. Her neighbor takes them upstairs and tucks them under the bed in an unheated bedroom. When they want some fresh tomatoes during the winter, they go upstairs and grab them, bring them downstairs, unwrap them and sit them on a window sill to ripen. They can have fresh tomatoes for a good part of the winter. I'd be interested in trying that. The attic would probably be a good place to store them. 

I just have my suspicions that I'll end up with tomato mush and a ton of fruit flies. 

4 comments:

  1. I've never heard that about tomatoes and suspect you are right about the mush and fruit flies. Let me know of the results if you try it.

    We finished up our tomatoes a couple weeks ago though the vines are still producing. I've been going down once a week to pick them and give them away by the five gallon bucket full to those who want them. I haven't run out of takers yet.

    One year we had two cherry tomato "trees" as you describe and no regular tomatoes. So after getting sick of eating them, I just collected them, pulsed them, skin, seeds and all in a food processor, cooked them down a bit and canned them into tomato sauce which I mixed in with the normal tomato sauce I canned. We never could tell definitively which was which. Not having to remove the skins was a real time saver though it took a lot of cherry tomatoes to make a quart of sauce.

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  2. I love fried green tomatoes. My mom used to make a relish or chow chow as she called it at the end of the garden and used up the green tomatoes. I don't have the recipes but I am sure one or more is on line somewhere. It was great with a pot of beans and cornbread.

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  3. I've got a recipe for Chow chow, Ellie. I looked one up. I also found a recipe for dilled green tomatoes. I've got another pot of tomatoes stewing, but I have to say that it looks like those green tomatoes might turn. This will probably be a daily thing for the rest of the week.

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  4. That's an interesting video. We had a volunteer cherry tomato plant come up a few years ago that was huge. I'm ashamed to say once we grew sick of them, we just ignored the plant rather than trying to give them away.

    I made chutney with green tomatoes one year.

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