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.

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.