Photo by double.reed, shared via
Flickr.
In many northern states, the tomato season is short enough that you might end up harvesting more green tomatoes than red ones. Never fear! Just like the giant agri-businesses, you too can ripen a green tomato to a delicious red one. All you need is to slowly and gently trap the natural ripening gases near your tomatoes. It is really quite simple.
Start with lidded cardboard boxes that are more than 12 inches deep. You want your boxes to be sort of shallow to decrease the pressure on the bottom tomatoes- too deep and the tomatoes will be crushed by their friends. Any cardboard box will do. Plastic boxes are a no-no, as they won't allow the tomatoes to breathe a little and thus will encourage spoilage.
Place the greenest tomatoes in a single layer at the bottom of the box.
Add a row of newspaper, then add the next greenest (fading to red in this case) on top.
Finish with another layer of newspaper, and the most ripe tomatoes you've got. In my case, the type of tomatoes roughly corresponds to ripeness, but that is not always the case. You don't need to put cherry tomatoes on top- it just turned out that way for me.
Close, label, and use the tomatoes as needed from the top downwards!
If you have so many tomatoes that you need multiple boxes, you have two options. Spreading all your tomatoes evenly into the boxes will ripen more, faster. This will decrease your tomato loss from spoilage. However, if you want to drag out your ripening process and don't mind losing a few tomatoes to rot or dessication, you can segregate the boxes by ripeness, i.e. doing a box of 100% green, another of 100% pale yellowy green, another of pale orange, etc. Either way will work, and each way has a downside. The choice is yours.
Cooked salsa is great for canning or freezing.
Harvest time this year has brought much more produce that we could imagine. It seems like everything I've made in the kitchen lately has been an attempt to maximize the path between the garden and the dinner table - I must say it's made for some interesting pizza concoctions.
Having a lot more produce has also led to a recent salsa experiment. I've made plenty of fresh salsa before (which I love), but I've never tried any cooked salsa. If I didn't have all these tomatoes, I might have skipped it, but cooked salsa will keep much longer than the fresh stuff. Now that it's done, I plan on eating salsa from the garden throughout the winter. I also plan on using up many of those mystery peppers that came from the assorted pepper mix of seeds!
Ingredients:
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 30 or so smaller tomatoes
- 2 green peppers
- Assorted peppers (hot and otherwise)
- 1 large onion
- 1/4 cup vinegar
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 3 tablespoons of salt
- 4 cloves of garlic
Chop/dice all the veggies. Sautee onions and peppers with the garlic. Combine with the tomatoes, sugar, and vinegar in a large pot. Simmer anywhere from ten minutes to a half hour to thicken the salsa and let the flavors mix. Salt to taste, and enjoy!
There are all kinds of fun variations you can do with cooked salsa. You can add corn, beans, apples... it's up to you and your garden!
Photo by Michael Spencer, shared via
Flickr.
This is what happens when an English teacher has a lack of books to review and a surplus of bruschetta to eat. Enjoy!
O king and lord of all the garden's fruit,
And harbinger of summer's golden days:
Without the benefit of harp and lute,
Thy lowly servant humbly sings thy praise.
To bubbling sauces thou dost bring rich life;
Or summer soups, sipped slowly by the pool.
Thy slices fall, slain warriors, by my knife;
In sandwiches, thou art the Golden Rule.
I dream of thee as winter's days stretch on
And blanket green with white, bleak mile by mile;
When every vestige of thy root is gone,
Thy scarlet lobes and crevices beguile.
But dreams of thee, like birds, must travel south;
Tomato, thou art happiest in my mouth.
Feeling poetic? Tell us how you feel about the arrival of fall, the end of summer, or whatever the seasons have brought you!
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