When life hands you Tomatoes…and more…and more….

You can do one of two things.  Either grab your hundreds of bushels of tomatoes and head over to Bunol, Spain for the La Tomatina Festival (the world’s biggest Food Fight)  OR…scour the internet, your cookbooks, and while your at it, even your neighbours cookbooks, for as many recipes using tomatoes as you can find.  Then get set to cook, can or eat your way through your bounty of tomatoes until you are so sick of them, you never want to see another tomato for as long as you live.

Or at least until next February, when you pull out the seed catalogue, and fall in love… all over again…with…

The Tomato

I love tomatoes.  So much so that I plant too many of them every year.  I get so excited first thing in the early spring when I start my seeds that I cannot bear to throw any seedlings out, even if I don’t have room for them.  To solve that little dilemma this year, I had hubby build two self-watering containers and took them to the cottage with 3 tomato plants so I will have fresh tomatoes at both locations.

DSC06614The rest are in the garden at home.  There are 4 Tom Tomato plants and 2 Cherry Tomato plants.  I went with just 2 cherry tom plants this year at home.  They are a dwarf, container style variety (so the seed packet said, we shall see), as last year I planted 6 regular cherry tomato plants and let me tell you…I was inundated with the little suckers.  The plants themselves were at least 5 foot high and just as wide.  I was giving them away, eating them, roasting them, canning them and anything else I could think of with them.  I even let the chipmunks steal some.  They would rip them open, take the seeds, then toss the tomato flesh aside like a used rag.  I think I may have been a little overzealous in keeping 6 plants…maybe…just a little..alright..a LOT overzealous.

So this year, I am all prepared. I have my canning jars all lined up.  I shall be making Tomato Sauce, Chunky Home~Made Salsa, Stewed Tomatoes, Chiles with Tomatoes (a suitable clone for RoTel for those Canucks that do not know what it is), Tomato~Basil Jam, my easy-peasy Bruschetta, tossing them in salads daily and many, many other recipes…. I will be the Tomato Canning Queen.  I could possibly even compete with Hunt’s or Heinz….  no really, I bet I could.  Ok, probably not, but I’d give them a good run for their money none-the-less.

Meanwhile, I will keep my pantry and freezer stocked full of delicious tomato goodness to get me through fall, winter and spring until I once again have a garden full of sweet,  delicious, red, ripe tomatoes.

Oh…and if you know of any new, innovative, funky ideas to use up tomatoes…please leave your recipes here…. I will welcome them with open arms and mouth….

3 thoughts on “When life hands you Tomatoes…and more…and more….

  1. I am SO jealous of your gardening, canning, cooking, etc. skills! I LOVE fresh garden tomatoes! Even my daughter asks for tomato slices from the Farmer’s Market as a snack. (good girl!) Unfortunately, my thumb is as green as mud. Enjoy!!

  2. LOL, Look out Heinz and Hunts, here comes Deb:) Tomatoes can be a staple in our house. I think over an average month how many meals I make with them. Of course during the fall months when toms are ripening by the buckets we gorge on toasted tom sandwiches (some days with bacon), tom salads and just popping the cherry or Tiny Tim Toms in the mouth like candy. Then comes canning/freezing time. I use the canned tomatoes for spaghetti, chili, taco sauce, pastas, lasagna, add some to pizza sauce, soups, stews and the list goes on. I can cherry toms whole with some tomato juice collected from making salsa. Then we open a jar and enjoy a bowl of toms with some toast and Cheez Whiz. Last year I was gifted a WONDERFUL jar of tomato/basil jam 😉 😉 and we hoovered it up quickly on crackers. This year I plan to make up a few jars of this jam. Had never tried it before and realized what I was missing. How are your tomato waterer containers working for ya? I seen your invention and was in awe, total jaw dropping moment, pure genius. Several years ago, I bought some long orange spouts that can be screwed onto pop bottle, then stuck in the ground to water container plants while we go on holidays. Sort of like the decorative watering globes that are advertised on TV now. Not nearly as pretty to have 1 or 2 litre pop bottles sticking up out of the ground but they worked great to water my toms. Now I have the toms planted close to the house, they are sheltered from the wind and frost, in a little cubby that collects the afternoon heat like a sauna and my eave trough drains right into the patch. I have an extra piece of eave troughing to relocate the rain water when the sky opens and farmers start to build arks. With the past years of drought that we have endured, our water table can handle many down pours. The wet years are starting again, noticed it last year and I am loving the showers we get now. A quick watering of some potted flowers and I am done. Moisture helps, I get very discouraged when it is dry out, why plant when you need to water every friggen night, so much work to try and enjoy a bit of flower colour. Rain brings more weeding so I suppose one chore evens out the other. Sorry, almost wrote my own blog to comment to you. Enjoy your toms, mother natures health food!

    • I think tomatoes are just about the most practical and useful ‘fruit’ there is. You use them in so many different things!! I see you have canning/preserving down pat too 🙂 Definitely make more of that jam, absolutely fantastic on crackers :D. The self-watering containers are a HUGE HIT! They work SO well I have not had to water the toms for a week at a time! A WHOLE WEEK!! The ones in the garden I have to water everyday or they will keel over (have an automatic timer setup with a sprinkler to come on once a day for 30 minutes when we are away).

      You have to try to make the containers, yes, not attractive, but extremely functional. I LOVE your idea of the pop bottles with the long spouts, you must email me a picture so I can get an idea of what it looks like – intriguing to say the least!

      Thanks for popping in with your mini blog – love and welcome all your comments!

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