Life of Wry

Well, hell, I’d better get a blog in before I forget how to do it. The longer I go, the behinder I get. Which is obvious. I see my last blog was August 19, so at least I haven’t let it go a month.

I will do better.

And when I do finally catch up — which I totally plan to do — these comments won’t make any sense.. but hey, that’s par for the blog course.

Anyway… with that…

I was moved to blog tonight because I have a ready topic: tomatoes. At the risk of being redundant to what I posted on Facebook this afternoon (redundant to? redundant with? See.. I’m rusty..), here is a photo of yesterday’s garden haul:

We are getting just tons and tons of tomatoes (in addition to chard, basil, zucs, cucs, eggplant, peppers and even melon). I hate to say how much of our harvest/s have gone bad and I feel terrible about every wrinkly zuc and moldy tomato that languishes in the produce drawer. That said, I’ve also managed to pick-clean-package-freeze a whole bunch of chard and basil, and we do a fairly decent job of keeping up with a lot of the the other stuff. But man, those tomatoes are now coming fast and furious.

This afternoon, after seeking and getting some helpful advice on what to do with tomatoes, I decided to roast and freeze the cherries. I’m deciding to forgo canning — at least right now — as freezing is a fine choice, especially if you have room in your freezer. It’s faster and easier, too. And may last longer. I’m no expert, but this seems like a pretty satisfying option to me.

Found a recipe:

Super easy. Starts like this…..

And after two hours, ends up like this….

Which then becomes these fantastic things that are flat, full of explosive flavor and are now in the freezer taking up hardly any space…

Will use with pastas, pizzas maybe, and who knows what during the winter. Should be heavenly.

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Contributing to my garden and tomato self esteem, I made a really great tomatoey dinner. I used a recipe I’d tried early in the pandemic, May of 2020, too early in the season for flavorful tomatoes (plus, we didn’t have a garden yet so had to use store-bought). It was sort of mediocre then, but seemed worth trying again with better ingredients. So this time, in the waning days of summer when the tomatoes are bursting with flavor, the recipe was a success.

It also used roasted tomatoes, these embellished with only olive oil, bread crumbs, parmesan, salt and pepper.

They’re only roasted for 20 minutes. Just before they’re done, you cook a quick batch of pasta (I used angel hair, though the recipe called for penne), add it to the roasted tomatoes, mix it up and serve it with parmesan at the table. That’s it. Rich flavor and easy peasy. I didn’t get a picture. Dessert was a wonderful honeydew melon From.The.Garden.

I mean really.