Tomatoes

I woke up this morning, and my thermostat was officially lower than I generally keep the house during winter. I had been complaining about making note of the fact that I was too hot on Saturday, and it was positively brisk today. Of course, with winds gusting around 50mph, it’s not surprising that the change came quickly.
I’m not quite ready to turn the heat on, though, so I instead used the cool weather as an excuse to oven-dry the big batch of yellow pear tomatoes I picked yesterday. Which, in turn, wound up being a good excuse to not leave the house; wind is my least favourite kind of ‘weather’. It’s too blowy, is what it is. I warmed the oven to 200F, tossed the halved tomatoes with olive oil, salt, pepper, and some garden herbs, and let them dry out for about seven hours. I took this photo at the four-hour mark, after I transferred them to the rack, thinking that would be more efficient.
I probably should have just called it quits at four hours, since I’ve put them in a jar in the freezer, anyway (I didn’t want leftover moisture to spoil them). Seven hours left them not burnt, but teetering on the edge of perfect and over-done. Oh well! I’m sure I’ll wind up using them for something, and they would have gone to waste, otherwise. (Speaking of salvaged near-disasters, I used my blender to mix a block of silken tofu into the baba ganoush I made the other day, and now it’s delicious instead of eye-wateringly garlicky.)
With the latest haul of regular-sized tomatoes, I made up another batch of tomato sauce. I’ve had several conversations this summer about making tomato sauce and the preserving of it. This is what I do: once the sauce is ready, pour it into the cups of a muffin tin that you’ve oiled. Let it cool to room temperature and then put it in the freezer (it helps if you have a chest freezer). Once the sauce is frozen solid (or two days later, when you finally remember about it), use a knife at the edge of each cup to pop out the sauce-puck and store them all in a plastic bag. Presto! Single servings of tomato sauce, ready to be thawed out. I usually use two when I make my veggie bolognese. Everybody I’ve shared my method with thinks it’s genius, and I think I can unbiasedly agree.
I’ve also got several jars of tomato soup in the freezer for this winter. The weather man’s been talking about overnight frost tomorrow night, although it might not creep in this close to the city. Either way, I’m pretty sure the ripening of tomatoes is drawing to a close, so now I can think about what to do with all the green ones. I’m definitely going to try breading some, fried-green-tomatoes-style. And I’m very excited about making a green tomato pie, which I’ve heard tastes just like apple pie.
One last thing, since I’m on the topic of tomatoes. When I was picking all the little yellow pear tomatoes, I decided to see how big the plant ‘really’ was. It had grown to the top of the cage, then grew and grew some more, so it had flopped over and was trailing on the ground. When I grabbed the end of one ‘branch’, I was able to lift it above my head, pretty much as far as I could reach! Yep, it’s been a good year for tomatoes, alright.