Dig It

A post on the season’s last three subscriber boxes is forthcoming, but first: tomatoes! I grew both cherries and heirlooms this summer, several varieties of each. The soft and sweet garden peach stood out as a favorite of mine, but the subscribers fell in love with the cherries. Several people told me that the snackable little fruits were like round, colorful pieces of candy.

Since the spring, I’ve been nervous about no longer having fresh tomatoes to eat. It’s become hard for me to eat “fast food” tomatoes, and, as a purported advocate of Slow Food and seasonal eating, I’m hesitant to pick up a pint from the store in the dead of winter (and know that I wouldn’t be satisfied even if I did). So, I’ve entered preservation mode.

Several weeks ago, I laid hands on a bushel of seconds from the farm on which I worked in college. Not having the time nor the energy to process them then, I spent a quick hour cutting off the moldy bits and threw them in the freezer. This afternoon, I decided to turn them into sauce.

Using a recipe from realsimple.com as a guide (click here), I turned a couple of gallon-sized Ziploc bags of frozen fruit into the equivalent of three jars of sauce. As a bonus, I also ended up with several cups of tomato soup stock, made from the liquid that rose to the top of the at-first-far-too-thin sauce. The process took some time (about three or four hours from start to finish), but it was easier than I expected, and I did get five meals out of it. With just a few weeks left before this region’s first frost, I hope to do this at least once more before winter rolls around, stocking the freezer for the tomato-less months ahead.