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Saturday, January 22, 2011

Preserving Tomatoes?


Okay, so this is more of a question than an informational post! Any thoughts folks on how to preserve a tomato glut to use over the year ahead? I planted LOTS of tomato plants because last year we had trouble with disease, so I wanted to be sure of a good harvest. There's a mix of roma types, a medium sized beefstakey-thing, and pear and cherry tomatoes.

I have thought about bottling - my parents do have a preserver and jars, so could show me how to do it. I'm wondering whether to do them as straight tomatoes, or go for tomato sauce with herbs, onion, etc added in. Other ideas include drying some in my Ezi-dri dehydrator. This is quite time consuming though, and the olive oil to put them in adds to the cost too so I'm probably only going to do a small amount of these. We do not have freezer space to keep anything much in there. And what space we have is currently taken up with Munchkin's food. I am contemplating how I could save up for an extra freezer over the course of this year...basically to store things like blueberries, tomatoes, feijoas and other seasonal produce.

How have you stored tomatoes in the past and what do you do differently now? Any favourite tomato recipes? In North QLD a few years back I made some really nice tomato soup. I basically chopped up fresh tomatoes (romas, mostly), added a bit of sweet chilli sauce, salt and pepper and a few fresh herbs, cooked, then pureed. It was really tasty!

Amy

Saturday, 22nd January, 2011

1 comment:

kiwimeskreations said...

My Mum did bottled spaghetti one year, and although she bottled tomatoes regularly they were the most likely thing to 'go off' so I have steered away from that.
The tomato soup sounds great if you had room to freeze it...
Blessings
M