Food, gardening, Nature, Travel, Uncategorized

Reaping the Bounty. Now What?

35 Comments

I travel just enough to get some airline miles but usually I don’t hit that sweet spot where you can turn them in for airline tickets. Instead I have magazines.  Lots of magazines – most of them food related (imagine that).  At this time of year, food magazines are always filled with recipes using the bounty of summer gardens.  And just in time too!  I’ve harvested all my basil (10 jars of pesto) and the tomatoes have just started to turn.  The first handful of grape tomatoes didn’t make it into the house but the two Romas went into a pasta and green bean salad yesterday.  I’m guessing in about a week or so, I’ll be overloaded with tomatoes and trying as many of this month’s magazine recipes as possible.  I think this one will be first:

Tomato Salad w/ Charred Corn & Peppers

4 ears of corn, shucked
1 c. roasted red peppers (save liquid)
2 T. olive oil
2 T plus 2 tsp. wine vinegar
1 ¼ tsp Aleppo pepper
½ tsp chopped oregano
2 ¼ lbs. tomatoes
½ tsp salt
½ c. queso fresco

  1. Grill the corn on medium heat until nicely charred, 8-12 minutes
  2. Cut the kernals off the cobs and combine with red peppers, 2 tsp of the pepper liquid, oil, 2 T vinegar, 1 tsp Aleppo pepper and the oregano.
  3. Slice the tomatoes, tossing with the remaining salt and tsp vinegar. Arrange on a plate and cover with the corn mixture, queso fresco and the remaining ¼ tsp Aleppo pepper.

Note: If you don’t have Aleppo pepper you can make a good substitute using 4 parts paprika and 1 part cayenne.

What would you like to do with an overload of tomatoes this year?

35 thoughts on “Reaping the Bounty. Now What?”

  3. My first instinct is to throw them at the Current Occupant of the White House. He’d probably think of a way to claim them as “fake produce,” though, and then we wouldn’t have them for pasta sauce.

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  4. If you do that be certain that they are very old and rotting, preferably with some worms in them. I would be happy to donate some rotten tomatoes to your cause.

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  6. Rise and Reap the Bounty Baboons,

    We are getting cherry tomatoes now. The larger tomatoes are just turning yellow—maybe next week.

    Tomato soup. I make and can tomato soup for the winter. Greg Brown had a song about “summer in a jar” and that is the experience. We haul some with us to AZ in the winter.

    That takes many tomatoes. Until then the is as follows:

    Sliced tomatoes with salt
    Bacon and Tomato sandwiches
    Garden pizza (pesto for the sauce. Thin slices of tomatoes over the pesto
    Mediterranean Garden Salad: Chop tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, add feta cheese and Greek olives, add chopped basil with vinaigrette.
    Pasta sauce
    Other

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  9. We’ve harvested only a couple of tomatoes so far, but it’s only a matter of days, now, before they’ll be ripening faster than we can eat them. One of my favorite pasta sauces this time of year is made using uncooked tomatoes, garlic, fresh basil and olive oil. It’s heavenly, and oh so easy. It’s a sauce that can be improvised on endlessly, depending on what you have on hand. Here’s a link to the basic idea as described by Lynne Rossetto Kasper on The Splendid Tablle: https://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/uncooked-tomato-sauce-for-fusilli

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  10. I see we have a food day here on the trail. I am someone start talking about books and We will be set for a 100 posts and replies.

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  11. Speaking of tomatoes ripening, my corn is just starting to tassel. Two weeks behind the neighbors, which is when it was planted, and those two weeks might be critically important this fall. So we just wait and see. It could be a little warmer to keep the corn moving. Mid 80’s, while too hot for me, is good for the corn.

    Oats is turning. Will be able to swath that maybe next week? And the cool weather is good for that; lets the kernels fill out with out being so hot the milk in the kernel “evaporates”, so to speak. And with no storms predicted in the 10 day forecast… we might be OK. We’ll see.

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  13. Found this very nice “Spiced Tomato Jam” recipe in Dori Sanders’ Country Cooking (she’s the author of Clover et al.), which calls for lots of tomatoes, and lemons, sugar, honey, cider vinegar, pickling salt, several spices… email me if you want the recipe and I’ll scan and send it.

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  14. Unfortunately, I’m not a gardener nor am I a cook. When I used to grow tomatoes and bell peppers, I would make fresh salsa, salsa and more salsa. And salads. That’s it. 🙂

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  17. I freeze them, assuming I can find the freezer space, when I get a surplus. When the weather turns cold in the fall and winter I make chili or stew in the crockpot. Haven’t done that for a long time though – I haven’t had that many tomatoes.

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