Tomatoes in the Kitchen

Last weekend I had a blog post brewing all about summer, heat, tomatoes, sweltering heat and cricket. Due to the aforementioned heat it never got written, as I languished in front of the fan completely absorbed in the The Hunger Games Trilogy. This weekend it is pretending to be autumn. Cool almost chilly winds almost persuade us into socks and warm tops. It rained in the night giving my carelessly forgotten laundry an extra rinse. But there are still the tomatoes.

Heaps of tomatoes arrive in my kitchen from the veggie garden every week, shrieking to be processed. Pasta sauce, pizza sauce, peeled and chopped and stashed in the freezer to save me buying tins of tomatoes for months. Last year with the help of my mother we got enough stashed away to last me till July.

This year I’ve made two huge batches of Jane- Anne's Tomato and Onion soup; one batch of pasta/pizza sauce that I wasn’t happy with but froze anyway. But I haven’t yet got any plain tomatoes processed. So that is today’s task. Blanching them in hot water to loosen the skins, peeling and chopping and parcelling away in bags to be frozen. Wrinkled fingers guaranteed.

I have worked through quite a few tomatoes during the week, inflicting this fresh tomato pasta sauce on our son far too often, but in last week’s heat the tomatoes aren’t lasting as long as they might. Every few days I have to check through the trays to discover the source of the penetrating smell that at first I blame on the dogs. Then there is the laborious business of tracking down the individual tomatoes responsible, removing them and their neighbours from the puddle of their demise, wiping and re-arranging the rest of the tray... the joys of fresh farm produce!

Even though this year we have quantities of tomatoes far in excess of our wants or needs, we haven’t managed to recapture the exquisite flavour of the self seeded tomatoes of two years ago, or even of last year’s crop. I guess there are good years and bad years for flavour, or perhaps our methods are rather too haphazard, leaving a lot to chance. Anyway it’s off to process tomatoes I go.

The pictures are from last weekend, when I made the soup and sauce. The big red cooler box on the table is also full of tomatoes.