What to Do With the Waves of Tomatos from the Garden

One of the reasons to love gardening is its ability to teach generosity. A tiny seed is planted and has the potential to produce many pounds of nutritious food, creating an illusion more like a magic trick than science.

Although some things don’t grow as planned, thanks to factors like weather, pests, and disease - others unexpectedly exceed expectations.

By the end of August, there are incoming waves of tomatoes and peppers, cosmos and zinnias, raspberries and basil.

When the garden is generous, the impetus to share is easy and neighbors and friends are the first to enjoy the surplus - a fresh bouquet of flowers; containers full of cherry tomatoes; yellow and red sweet peppers; thin-skinned shishito peppers; and crunchy, aromatic stalks of celery are just some of the late summer goodies.

Beyond immediately sharing the fresh bounty, there are ways to preserve garden gold - mainly canning and freezing.

Favorite recipes for tasty salsas and sauces are dug out from between the pages of a cookbook or a tab on a phone.

For those who have the freezer space and prefer a less time-consuming task than canning, freezing is the way to go. Sweet peppers sliced into long, thin pieces are individually frozen on a cookie sheet then tossed into freezer bags.

Pesto made from fresh basil, olive oil, walnuts or pine nuts, garlic, and salt and pepper are scooped into empty ice cube trays, frozen, and stored in freezer bags.

Salsas, sauces, and peeled tomatoes are easily contained in bags bound for the freezer, to be thawed on cold days in January when the memory of a fresh tomato is as distant as the moon.

In my household, pasta is on the menu frequently, whether with pesto, tomato sauce, or the simple luxuries of butter and parmesan cheese.

Over the past month and a half, home made tomato sauce on spaghetti or linguine has been front and center. The preparation is the same every time. Included here are my process, ingredients, and preferences for serving.

Maybe you’ll try this version or maybe you already have the version that you love and are loyal to.

Either way, enjoy the local, fresh foods of the season - however you prepare them - before the short days and cold nights steal them away.

September’s Roasted Tomato Sauce

(4 servings)

For this recipe, I like to use a mix of plum and cherry tomatoes. My favorite varieties to use are San Marzano plum tomatoes (bred specifically with less seeds and lower moisture content, making it perfect for tomato sauce) and Sungold cherry tomatoes (golden orange when ripe and the sweetest, tartest cherry tomato I’ve ever eaten). If you can’t find these varieties, I’d still recommend a mix of plum and cherry tomatoes, though I sometimes throw in an heirloom or sandwich tomato cut into quarters.

Ingredients:

3-4 lbs plum tomatoes, sliced in half

24 cherry tomatoes, sliced in half

6-8 Tbsp olive oil

Salt & pepper, to taste

1-2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

fresh basil

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Wash tomatoes, cut in half (or quarters for large tomatoes).

Lay out plum tomatoes, sliced-side facing up, on two sheet pans. Line them up next to one another, but flat on the sheet pan.

Disperse the cherry tomatoes, facing up, across the bottom layer of plum tomatoes creating a second layer, so they aren’t touching the pan.

Drizzle 6-8 tbsp olive oil across all the tomatoes in your sheet pans.

Season with salt and pepper.

Roast for an hour.

After roasting, carefully transfer everything on the pan into a saucepan.

Stir in 1-2 tbsp of balsamic vinegar.

Simmer on the stove, stirring frequently to absorb additional watery liquid.

Additional salt and pepper, to taste.

Serve on top of warm pasta. Garnish with a couple fresh basil leaves.