Make quick work of preserving your tomato harvest by canning tomatoes whole. It’s an easy way to preserve their fresh taste, and will give you a product that you can use any number of ways.
Make quick work of preserving your tomato harvest by canning tomatoes whole. It’s an easy way to preserve their fresh taste, and will give you a product that you can use any number of ways.
Stewed tomatoes are delicious served as a main course or as a side dish, and they’re a frequent ingredient in chili, soup, stew and casserole recipes. If you’re looking for a simple way to use up some of the excess tomatoes from your garden, you should definitely consider stewing some of your harvest. It’s a quick and easy process, and it doesn’t require canning.
Is your garden producing tomatoes faster than you can eat them? Turn some of your surplus into diced tomatoes to use in your fall and winter cooking.
Have more tomatoes than you know what to do with? Use some of them to make your own crushed tomatoes, so you won’t have to rely on the store-bought kind whenever a soup, stew, chili or casserole recipe calls for a can. Homemade crushed tomatoes are really easy to make, and they’re way more flavorful than anything you can buy at the grocery store. Preserve your crushed tomatoes by canning them or freezing them. They’re great either way. Here’s how to make a batch.
Have loads of tomatoes coming in from your garden, but no time to make anything with them? Just freeze them until you have more time. Here’s my preferred method.
This tomato soup with goat cheese is one of my go-to recipes for busy nights because it comes together so quickly. Just throw six ingredients into a soup pot, and in 15 minutes you have a dinner that tastes like it took much longer.
Plant your tomatoes the right way, and you’ll have a bigger harvest, plus fewer pests and problems to contend with throughout the season. Here’s what you need to know to tackle the job like a pro.
Ever made a recipe that you found on Pinterest or a blog, only to have it be a big flop? Yep, that happened to me last night.
One of my favorite blogs had a recipe for creamy pumpkin spaghetti, which sounded amazing, and looked better still. So, I made it for dinner, and the sauce came out a liquidy mess. I triple and quadruple checked the recipe to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake, but nope. There must have been a typo somewhere in the recipe.
I grabbed an extra jar of pumpkin puree to thicken the sauce, and that got dinner on the table, but it wasn’t the amazing dish that I’d been anticipating all afternoon. Bummer.
It did get me thinking, though. Surely, I could come up with a pumpkin tomato sauce that was all the things I had expected that one to be. A sauce with the gorgeous color and creamy texture of pumpkin and the savory goodness of a tomato-based sauce.
Yep, I could do that. And while I was at it, I’d also make sure there wasn’t anything fussy about the recipe. It would be something with minimal ingredients and minimal cook time. It would contain ingredients that most people have on hand, and it wouldn’t leave little bits of ingredients left over. If it required opening a can of something, I’d make sure the whole can went into the recipe. In short, it would be the kind of recipe that I look for.
And that’s how I found myself in the kitchen today, making batch after batch of sauce, until I landed on the winner. And oh boy, is it a winner. My new pumpkin tomato sauce recipe has a gorgeous color and texture, and it melds the pumpkin and tomato flavors beautifully. It’s jam-packed with nutrients, too; so it’s something you can feel good about feeding your family. Oh, and did I mention it takes less than 30 minutes to make? Yep, definitely a winner.
But don’t take my word for it. Make it, and see for yourself.
Living in the South, sun-dried tomatoes aren’t much of an option for me. It’s just too humid outside for tomatoes to dry out properly. But that’s okay because I can make the same thing in my dehydrator. I made my first batch of the season yesterday, and thought I’d take you through the process.
Yesterday, I showed you how to peel tomatoes. Today, let’s look at how to core and seed tomatoes. It’s a skill you’ll need, if you want to make your own salsa or tomato sauce.
One of the challenges of cooking from scratch is that lots of recipes assume that you already know how to do lots of things, whether it’s how to wash, peel and chop a particular ingredient or some other skill that you just haven’t had need for yet.
Let’s work on mastering some of those basic skills, so that you’ll know just what to do when they come up in a recipe.
Today I’d like talk about peeling tomatoes. If you dream of making your own tomato sauce, this is the first step, and it’s an easy one.