a tomato-y three-fer

Tomatoes, especially home-grown, are a summer joy. This year we’re having a fine tomato season here in central Texas.

I bought several bags of Cidery raised produce from my friends at Texas Keeper. They opened for pick-up/take-out (they still are open, and they ship!!) and offered the community all sorts of goodies in addition to their ciders.

Anyway, I ended up with a wild variety of tomatoes – large, extra large (this is Texas, after all), some Romas, and some cherryish single bites. They were beautiful, smelled wonderful, and were more than I could possibly eat before they went bad.

So, I made sauce.

Now I know there’s that whole dip them in boiling water and skin them, then seed them, *then* cook them school, but I’m lazy. I just halved them. But first I added some olive oil, onion, and garlic to the pot, sauteed, and when everything was soft I added the tomatoes, some lemon thyme, and a bit of basil. Cooked it low and slow, and oh didn’t my kitchen smell heavenly!

soon to be sauce

Once everything cooked down, I fished out the tomato skins and pureed everything else. The resulting sauce was (she said modestly) terrific! So, that’s one.

I took the skins and laid them out on parchment paper and, yes, dehydrated them on the dashboard of my car. You know the drill, since we’ve done this before. Remember those blueberries? And that peach “leather”? So good…

But, you may ask, tomato *skins*? Really? Oh, yes! They dried into melt-in-your-mouth tomato crisps (for lack of a better descriptor). They dried out in an afternoon, and while I snacked on some of them, the rest I ground to powder in my spices-only coffee grinder. A pinch of this stuff really wakes up hard-boiled eggs! So, that’s two.

As I had more tomato sauce than I could use, I considered freezing it in my ice cube trays as I’ve done other times, but it was so good and fresh-tasting that I didn’t want to. You may think this sounds crazy, but trust me – it was amazing.

I had watermelon in the fridge, and it needed to be used up. I cubed it up, took out all the seeds I could find, and put it in my blender. I added about 1/2 cup of that (by then well-chilled) tomato sauce to roughly 2 cups of watermelon, and pureed it. The resulting liquid was the most astonishing combination of savory and sweet – my mouth didn’t know what to make of it! It was so good that I drank up all the watermelon and most of the tomato sauce and completely failed to take any pictures!

Was it a cold soup? Maybe. Was it a smoothie? Sort of, I suppose. Was it a bloody Mary base? Hmmmm, perhaps. Was it delicious? Definitely! So that’s three…

I hope you and yours are staying safe and finding good in this challenging (for a variety of reasons) time. Until next (and soon)… bon appetit!