3 different family members have given me tomatos and they keep spoiling

  • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
    6·
    9 months ago

    Tomato sauce. Freeze into cubes using and ice tray. Stays good for a very long time, she you can defrost just what you want to use.

  • amio@kbin.social
    4·
    9 months ago

    Confit a bunch. Make some garlic confit while you’re at it. That stuff, especially on some decent bread, is ridiculous.

    Make buttloads of “base sauce” (you can then easily turn it into pizza/pasta sauce or whatever just by adding things) or just passata.

    Soups, stews, curries.

    Good tomatoes work pretty well as a “sandwich topping”, bit of mayo, salt and pepper is all you need.

  • athos77@kbin.social
    3·
    9 months ago

    I hate to send anyone to That Other Place, but the/r/legaladvice salsa is very good, and you can can it if you add a bit of lemon juice.

    When I have a large crop, if I have time, I’ll make marinara and freeze it in like one-cup containers.

    If the crop is too large or I don’t have time, I’ll go through, remove the stems, and cut out any small bad bits (tomatoes with large bad bits will get used in other ways). I’ll get out the largest pot I own and put all the tomatoes in it, using a potato masher to break them all open and get them in the pot. Then I put it on medium heat, stirring occasionally. The water will start to evaporate. About 1/2 of the way down, I take it off the stove and run everything through a colander, putting the skins, the part where the stems attach, and most of the seeds aside. (You can compost them or use them to make soup stock (or you can freeze them along with other veggie scraps if you can’t make stock at the moment)).

    Then I return the tomatoes to the stove, stirring occasionally. Toward the end, you finally actually start having to pay attention and stir more frequently, but eventually they’ll take on the thick consistency of tomato paste - stop the cooking then. Let it cool down, then spread them into ice cube trays and put them in the freezer. Once frozen, move the cubes into a freezer Ziploc.

    You can use the cubes as needed: use as-is for tomato paste, or add varying amounts of water for tomato sauce or puree, then use the tomato paste/puree/sauce as an ingredient, or to make marinara, pizza sauce, tomato soup, lasagna, etc, etc.

    The nice thing with the boiling-down thing is that you can boil down a tall stockpot of tomatoes into a couple ice trays of tomato paste - it’s incredibly space-efficient.

  • Taako_Tuesday@lemmy.ca
    3·
    9 months ago

    For the smaller ones, tomato confit (baking in a bath of oil) is really good, can be used as a topping for pizza, put on toast, put on foccacia if you make that, or can just be eaten as a snack. I usually throw a head of peeled garlic in there, and then I have nicely flavored oil that I can keep as well.