Monday, July 16, 2012

So Many Tomatoes!

Seriously - who is going to eat all of these tomatoes???


And that isn't even all of the ones that I picked on Saturday. I missed some and had to go back down to the garden to get them.  That also doesn't include the bazillion cherry and grape tomatoes that were on those plants.

I seriously think J was smoking crack when he decided to plant the garden this year.  Why else would he plant 8 tomato plants???

Anyway, I'm trying to come up with things to do with our bounty.  I've already given a bunch away to my coworker and J took some down to our neighbors last night.

I've used the tomato press that we got as a wedding gift and we have probably 4 quarts of tomato pulp for use in future sauces:


We've already canned a crapload:

(We have two dozen of these quart jars)

And I already made a big batch of sauce that we used for spaghetti and stuffed manicotti.  So I decided to get creative and find another way to use some of them.

Homemade sun dried tomatoes:

I did two different trays - one with the tomatoes quartered with some basil sprinkled on and one with the tomatoes sliced with oregano:


Popped them in the oven at 175 degrees for the entire day (and 120 degrees overnight):


And voila!



We have some sun (oven) dried tomatoes.


Now I need to find some fancy recipes to use my tomatoes and hope that they taste ok.  And come up with some other uses for the dozens of tomatoes we still have left so J doesn't try to make a tomato pie (barf).

If only the munchkin would eat tomatoes. Or anything for that matter.

5 comments:

  1. OMG. My husband planted 6 tomato plants! Thankfully, I convinced him to plant romas because those are my favorite and we would always have w343434354354545 cherry tomatoes and he likes those but I do not. And his like of them never came close to eating alllll the ones he would plant! We've enjoyed caprese salad, taco topping, chicken pasta topping, salads, BLTs...

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    1. We have 1 grape, 1 cherry, 2 roma, and the rest are the bigger tomatoes. I don't know what he was thinking. There are a million little tomatoes out there - it's gotten to the point where if I see a mark or crack on one I just chuck it in the corner and don't even bring it in the house.

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  2. How neat! I wish we had tomatoes. We just don't get enough sun all day for them, and if we did the dang birds would pluck them all off like they did our cherry tree! The oven dried ones made my mouth water!

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    1. The birds ate all my blackberries and raspberries but they've mostly left the tomatoes alone.

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  3. Totally jealous. I would love to have that many tomatoes to save for the winter. We just started getting some ripe tomatoes. Last year I roasted some cherry tomatoes and then made pesto with it and froze it. If you enjoy pesto, I recommend it!

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