Monday, September 27, 2010

Harvest Time

Traveling always gives great amounts of material and pictures to blog about so it's always a bit difficult to summon up the writing juices when I get back. But we did come back to find that Wife's tomato and pepper plants were full of fruit and needing to be harvested and processed.

We have all kinds of different varieties this year thanks to the prolific grower from seeds that is Cabinet Lady. Each year she gives us a mix and it's interesting to see what they all are.

These little cherry tomatoes are incredibly sweet

Some of the larger tomatoes along with four different varieties of pepper (three of them hot peppers)

A couple of middle of the road varieties - I think we have six in all

For storing I like roasting them best. Gets rid of the moisture and concentrates the flavor

I split them in half and then squeeze out the seeds. No need to skin them. After the slow long roasting the skins become a non-issue in my opinion.

Sprinkle with salt, pepper, oregano, basil, and a little olive oil
Then roast at 220 degrees for 2 to 4 hours depending on the size of the tomato.
Most of the water should be gone.
Then I put them in either plastic containers or plastic bags and freeze them.

I made a simple pasta sauce with some of them pureed in the blender with a little chicken stock base, and water. Then added that to some sauteing garlic and black pepper. Very good. Lots of tomato flavor but the slow roasting gets rid of a lot of the acidity.

The peppers I just dry. Here in New Mexico the air is so dry that you can just leave them out. It takes about 4 weeks. Then I usually break them up and store them in the freezer until ready to use.

5 comments:

alexis said...

man, I wish I could dry stuff here - not much chance of that ;)

terri said...

There's not much left of our garden other than LOTS of squash. I picked what are sure to be the last of the cherry tomatoes. We planted Sweet Baby Girls this year. They're like candy, they're so sweet!

Of course, I'm not proactive enough to do anything with our produce that would allow us to enjoy it into the fall or winter months.

Lakeview Coffee Joe said...

Man, that is a LOT of tomatoes. I do like cherry tomatoes though.

Anonymous said...

Mmmm I like tomatoes! Can't wait until Mike and I get a house someday and we can have a garden

Mike said...

You and wife appear to have quite the green thumb. I wish we had a place for a garden here.