Tomatoes

We have 27 tomato plants in our little garden.

No joke.

There are 6 different tomato varieties (I thought we had 9 but can't remember the other 3 for the life of me.. will verify with T later). We have your regular beef steak and cherry tomatoes. T wanted to try amish paste because he's heard they are good (they are). And then he went a little crazy.

Again, no joke.

I seriously thought I was going to have to commit him this spring. I have never seen another person get so horny (for lack of a better term) over tomatoes! I honestly didn't know what to make of it.

So we ended up with a red zebra, golden girl and yellow pear as well. He was searching and searching for other seedlings at the nursery (Everlasting Farm) just because the names sounded cool, but we were there just too late in the planting season and they were all gone by then.

Speaking of Everlasting Farm, they were a new find for us this year. We both absolutely loved it. They have a fantastic selection of plants (ornamental and edible). I drooled over the landscaping.

But I digress. I'm talking about tomatoes today!

Today, I finally had the opportunity to make my first batch of tomato sauce for the year. We use a recipe we found in Martha Stewart Magazine last year. We just happened upon it about the time we needed to start preserving our tomatoes. Martha's Simple Tomato Sauce recipe is simply wonderful. It's very easy to make and is extremely delicious. It's suggested in the recipe to add your choice of meats, vegetables or herbs after taking it out of the freezer for use. We decided to add the herbs during the cooking process, while they're fresh. I was very generous with the basil and parsley. I also added a bit of oregano. It is also suggested to run it through a food mill for a smoother sauce. We just use our immersion blender a bit in the finished product and that works just fine for us.

Getting the sauce started

My favorite way to use this sauce is in a veggie lasagna. I saute chopped mushrooms and green peppers before mixing into my sauce and layering my lasagna. We tried it tonight on pizza, too. No more jarred pizza sauce for us (I have no excuse for using jarred, anyways)!

All done! Yummy!!

My next project with the tomatoes is to dehydrate some of them. I'm thinking of dehydrating the golden girls because we weren't overly crazy about the texture of them. I'm also going to dehydrate some of the cherry and yellow pear tomatoes. I've never dehydrated tomatoes, so this will be yet another experiment in our household.

Wish me luck!