Sun-dried tomatoes may be a 90s food cliche, but for good reason—they’re useful, delicious, and a nice change from canned in the depths of winter. Drying tomatoes yourself is easy-peasy. Do it in several batches throughout late summer and fall, and then use them until tomato season comes again. You don’t need a dehydrator—an oven or several hot, sunny days will do.
Barbecue sauce drives me nuts. It’s expensive—$6 or $7 for a jar, which you can easily use up in one meal’s worth of chicken-grilling. A given jar is too sweet, or not spicy enough, or too Memphis-y when you need it to be Texas-ish, or vice versa. The solution is to keep like a dozen slightly different open bottles in your fridge.
Or you can make your own!
In a pinch, you can always stir up a perfectly respectable barbecue sauce with good ketchup, brown sugar, and seasonings. But this is a recipe for processing fresh tomatoes into a beautiful shelf-stable sauce that you can make very plain and then dress up when you use it, or make into the sauce of your dreams from the get-go.
I will tell you a secret: I never buy tomatoes specifically for barbecue sauce-making. Instead, I use the good, sound leavings (peels, pulp, cores, and under- or overripe specimens) from canning tomatoes—they all break down with long cooking and add lovely body and deep tomato flavor to the sauce. Can your tomatoes and then make sauce the next day, or freeze the trimmings and make sauce at your leisure. Zero-waste preserves, huzzah!
Tomato season, soup weather, and turn-of-the-year colds only intersect for so long. Go for it.
Actually, this is one tomato soup that is just fine with less-than-awesome tomatoes. It’s better, of course, with fantastic late-summer tomatoes, but the long roasting concentrates and magnifies the flavors of even the most insipid pink baseball. Even better: Roast good tomatoes now and freeze them to make this soup in the winter.
Tomatoes at last.
I was seriously fretting that we’d miss out on canning tomatoes this year—I was out of town during our usual week for tomato preserves, and we’re traveling next weekend, too. I kept dreaming of an early frost before I got back, a tornado, a nationwide run on citric acid, maybe? Catastrophizing the harvest.
But it all worked out. We picked up our promised 40 pounds of tomatoes and set to work.
Canning tomatoes at home has the highest return-on-investment of all the preservation things I do. I’ll use them in soups, stews, braises, crushed over pizza, in sauces, in sandwiches, everywhere all the time. For my money, good local tomatoes canned carefully at home beat commercial tomatoes hands-down—flavor-wise, footprint-wise, definitely price-wise.
Here’s my favorite summer panzanella—it’s almost nothing more than good bread and good tomatoes set off with a little grill char. It’s so dead simple. It absolutely makes the most of excellent summer produce. It goes with everything. But I could eat a bathtub full of it by itself.
Sometimes you have beautiful late-summer produce that begs to be barely cooked and set off in some sort of lovely frame. You dream about rough-puff doughs, pate brisees, phyllos. You look at the thermometer and mop your brow and abandon the thought of turning on the oven. So you make a “tart” in a polenta crust instead.
Polenta, we hail thee. Is there anything you can’t do?
Tomato season is on us. This is the first year that this garden has produced really good tomatoes. All the ingredients were right: A short, wet spring and then a long, hot summer; not too many flea beetles; (finally) a good watering set-up. Our early hailstorms were wet and slushy and didn’t do much damage. Result: Millions of tomatoes (well, dozens, anyway).
We’ll be drying and canning like crazy people over the next couple of weeks. And eating tomatoes right and left; I’m not above taking a pinch of salt with me into the garden and eating at least one straight off the vine, warm with stored sun. Surreptitious stealth-eating does not a dinner make, though, so here’s one way to show off the ripest, sweetest, juiciest tomatoes of late summer.
Tomato soup and grilled cheese, eaten on the floor while watching Gamera vs. Gyaos. A good February Wednesday.
I like all tomato soups, but I am especially fond of simple, clean ones in the winter. The summer seems closer somehow, that way.
The second round of tomatoes we canned. Nothing done to the photos but cropping; they really were that red. From back in September, but sometimes January needs a bit of cheering up.
It’s getting to be ridiculous with the pie and the cake. This is a pear pie with walnuts sweetened with maple syrup.
More tomatoes - it feels like the season is finally getting going. This is a costoluto-type, from a seed saved from a farmer’s market tomato last summer. They’re very pretty.
And the cucumbers are coming in. I’m going to try to catch them at the small 2-inch stage - it’s crazy how fast they grow. The blossoms hang on for what seems like forever, and then suddenly the fruit becomes giant in a day.
Happy family.
Garden Log
Half a pound of Juliets, and lots of Romas look ripe.
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