freezing our tomatoes

if you haven't guessed by now, i'm slightly tomato obsessed! it was a long, sad winter without the delicious fresh tomato taste as i refuse to buy them out of season from a grocery store. between missing harvest season and moving suddenly last year, i didn't get the chance to preserve any of last summer's bounty. now i have the chance!

we may have planted a few more tomato plants than needed, and we didn't expect them to do so well as the past couple years have been bad for dry rot. anyways we ended up with a ton of enormous, delicious tomatoes and we don't want any of the bounty to go to waste.

we are currently housed in a small bachelor basement apartment which we refer to as our 'hobbit hole'. though it has many benefits such as a huge back yard in which we can grow as much food as we want, there are drawbacks like not having a real kitchen. our tiny little induction element isn't big enough for a canning pot, but we do have a chest freezer so we decided this year we would try freezing them.

as you can imagine we spent a great deal of time trying to decide what was the best way to deal with tomatoes before freezing.. should we skin them? cut them? core them? freeze them whole??? and we decided after weighing the pros and cons of all the methods that we would simply bag them up and freeze them whole. that way we can take from the bags as needed, and they should be easy to skin after thawing anyway. this will better lock in the flavour than if they were skinned or cut i think, no matter the method they're pretty well guaranteed to be mushy, so we opted for the least impact method. plus we had tons, and there's still five times more not ready yet.

we will have to deal with them when we return from the east coast, many soups and sauces are in the future of this batch. we have already used some of the yellow ones fresh for sauce, and they added a sweet fresh flavour to our pasta dish. i was planning to try roasting them with peppers and garlic and making a delicious salsa with them as well.

late august bounty

it's harvest time in the garden.. there's something becoming ripe for our enjoyment daily. we have enjoyed fried green tomatoes, eggplant tempura and eggplant burgers [that turned out amazing!], various flavours of tea, some super fresh pasta sauce, spices, sandwiches [made with deli fresh bread!] and salads.. all grown in our very own back yard.

one thing i'm most proud of growing has to be our giant sunflower. there are half a dozen or so around the back yard, but this one in particular is massive. it stands well over our heads and the stalk is well over an inch across, and it hasn't even flowered yet! but it's working on it.. we had a late start this year with our last minute move, so we didn't have a chance to start a garden right away after last frost. on top of that we had to start from scratch in an overgrown backyard turned meadow after the grass had a chance to get waist height. what an adventure... and here we are, almost fall. what a great gardening experience, so much learned and so much yet to try!

tomato rainbow..

between the batch of green tomatoes knocked loose from last week's incident, and the ones coming up ripe on the vine, we have been feasting on many garden fresh specimens. cherries for salads, early girl for sammiches, and the greens were some delicious heirlooms that we ended up slicing green to make some fried green tomatoes. it was my first time trying them as i had never fancied the idea of eating them green, but they turned out to be very yummy, zesty and flavourful!

so flavourful in fact, that i refuse to eat 'fresh' tomatoes in the winter. these so called tomatoes that you can get at the grocery store are bland, watery and acidic in comparison to any tomato grown and picked fresh off the vine. luckily this year we should have enough left over to do some canning so that we have garden fresh goodness to make sauce and salsa with all winter, yum!