Summer Harvest & Preservation Chronicles: Tomatoes

Remember those tasty Pompeii tomatoes that I’ve featured in a couple of recipes? Well, now they are starting to ripen in bulk, so instead of just a pizza to use a tomato or two, it is time to start stocking up for the winter! Here are some of these nice sauce tomatoes, just picked from the garden:

Not only do they look great, but they also smell delicious already!

These tomatoes are going to be used to make some sauce that will be frozen in small containers. It’s great on its own for pasta or in dishes like chicken parmesan. It speeds up recipes a lot, like canned sauce from the grocery store would, but it’s really a big step up!

First you need to prepare the tomatoes for cooking. Start out by peeling them; you have several options for this. If you have lots of tomatoes, you might want to use hot+cold water to loosen the skins (more on that in a later post). There weren’t a whole lot of tomatoes this time, so the tomato peeler came in handy. What a useful tool! You can also use a knife, which you will need to cut the tomatoes up. Cut them in half lengthwise, scoop out the seeds, and then cut them up into smaller pieces that are roughly the same size. Then just throw them in a pan with a little butter, a beef bouillon cube and basil, rosemary, and sage. If you have fresh herbs, definitely use them!

Now just leave them to cook, stirring occasionally. It’s pretty hard to mess this part up. A lot of juice will cook out of the tomatoes, so that you will have the pieces in a very thin sauce, then it will cook down further, so that the sauce is thicker and the tomato pieces are very soft and starting to break down.

To make the sauce extra healthy, add some heavy cream. You can add as much or as little as you want. It will end up being a creamy pink color, like this (unless you don’t want as much cream, but why wouldn’t you?).

This sauce is a staple of my diet. It’s quick and easy when the garden is producing, and easy to freeze to heat up later or make from canned tomatoes. It’s good on its own over pasta or used in recipes that call for tomato sauce. I even dipped some out of the pan to eat as tomato soup with a pimento cheese sandwich!

Go get some tomatoes and try it out. With a sauce that’s this fast, easy, and delicious, you may never buy another can again!

How Does Your Garden Grow?

With lettuce leaves, and onion sprouts, and potted herbs all in a row!

That’s right, the garden is starting to go in! It’s very exciting. We started some lettuce from seed a couple of weeks ago, but clearly it is still tiny little leafy sprouts. Therefore, we set out a few lettuce plants as well, so that we can start eating it soon! We chose some red lettuce for our bigger plants.

They look a little wilted and squashed now, but they will perk right back up in no time. I’m sure the rain that has been coming down all afternoon will help!

The pieces of wood are sort of a gardening secret, but more just a sign of bad cat behavior (or, I guess really just normal cat behavior). It keeps them out of the boxes. They, of course, think this soil that we have worked up to be nice and soft is just for them. I am sure you can figure out why they like it and the reason we don’t want them in there!

We also put out our little baby onions. They look adorable sticking up out of the dirt! Hopefully they will become big onions this year instead of just the slightly larger onions we often end up with. We certainly put enough mushroom compost and home-made compost in there! Surely they will be happy and swiftly-growing little onions!

Then of course we have the ever-crucial herbs! Food is always better with fresh herbs, so we make sure to have plenty!

Here we have parsley, sage, thyme, tarragon, and basil. Also a couple of Don Juan climbing roses, which we will set out in the ground once we decide where to put them! The thyme and sage plants lived through the winter sheltered somewhat from the elements in the garden house.

The thyme did the best. It kept all of its growth from last summer and looks downright bountiful and artistic! You can see the parsley peeking up behind it, and the rather bedraggled looking sage to the right.

Here’s the French tarragon. You can see the new plant we put in at the top, and at the bottom there is a tiny sprout of the old plant coming back. I want to be sure there’s plenty. Bearnaise sauce is completely necessary to put on steaks in the summer!

Last, but certainly not least, is the basil! We use it more than anything else. I could eat pasta made from fresh tomatoes and basil every day! It’s also great for making pesto, which you can eat fresh or freeze to use in the winter. Pesto is great as an ingredient or to just eat as an hors d’oeuvres on toasted bread.

As much as I love nice spring weather, setting out all of the vegetables and herbs really gets me impatient for them to start producing lots of delicious food!

Pizza Night!

When pizza is homemade, it isn’t even unhealthy!

Think about how thirsty you get when you have a delicious greasy take-out pizza- that’s from the mountains of salt they use. Not a problem with this pizza! The high-quality ingredients have plenty of flavor and therefore don’t need all that extra salt.

The great thing about homemade pizza is that you can throw anything you’ve got on it, and it will probably be delicious. This is my favorite.

Make up a pizza crust (or two, or more) and bake it for a few minutes, then bring it back out to put on the toppings. This helps to keep the crust from getting soggy. You will still have a delicious pizza without this step, but it will be messy!

I bake my crust on a pizza stone in the oven. The traditional way of getting the crust off of the paddle and into the oven and back is to put corn meal on the paddle before you put the crust down. Maybe there is a secret that I have not discovered, but I find this to be difficult and messy. I put a piece of parchment paper under the crust, and pull paper, crust and all onto the pizza stone and then back onto the paddle. You can just bake the pizza on top of the parchment paper. This is very easy, no mess, and helps keep the crust from getting stretched when you put it in. It will also keep any runover from the pizza sauce out of your oven. I’m always looking for a way to make less of a mess.

If you have fresh tomatoes to use in the sauce, that is ideal, but this time of year I can’t imagine who would have them, so get canned ones. Our home canned tomatoes are running low, so we bought some. You can get canned Pompeii tomatoes, which are better for sauces than regular ones.

For my toppings, I put caramelized onions, which make anything better, basil, roasted red peppers, and mushrooms. Then on top add your sliced fresh mozzarella and bake it! When you bring it out grate on some parmigiano reggiano. It is expensive, but so worth it!

Chances are, you will have more pizza sauce and mozzarella than you will need if you are only making one pizza. Put the sauce in a plastic container and put it with the mozzarella in a freezer bag. You can store it in the refrigerator or even in the freezer, and pull them out another time, giving you a good head start on a meal. If you are planning on having your next pizza in the next day or two, you can even make up enough dough for two crusts and put one in the refrigerator. You will just have to assemble your pizza when you get ready to eat.

Always look for the little shortcuts that make life easier. A little preparation ahead of time saves a lot later!