The Tomato Solution

The garden has been producing tomatoes for about one month now and I have hit my wall.  I can barely stand to eat them right now.  I buy "Suddenly Salad" kits weekly to use the small ones, I slice the big ones and sprinkle them with my favorite greek seasoning, and I add them to every burrito and sandwich.  I tried to give them away in gallon bags and no one would take them.  Come on, they are yellow and purple!  They are so cool! 

This was what I picked yesterday.  The large ones are on the bottom, followed by Romas, followed by grape tomatoes.  That is a reusable grocery bag and it is almost half full.  From ONE DAY of picking.  I failed to take a "before" picture, but the kitchen counter, which is a cluttered on a good day and usually piled with piles piled upon piles of junk, was also covered with an overflowing bowl of garden produce with tomatoes rolling everywhere and hiding under every pile.  It's been four years since I've done this and I hadn't planned on doing it, but I didn't see any other choice...

Yes, I impulsively decided to freeze tomatoes last night.  At 8:00 p.m. What you see here is about one fourth of what I processed .

Ugh, blanching tomatoes is so gross.  And you can try to be neat about it but it transforms the kitchen into a war zone.  Also, although the whole process from start to finish took less than an hour, the kids could just NOT handle me focusing my attention on something besides them during this hour.  There was screaming, whining and crying as I tried to block it all out and finish what I started.  At one point Tessa was standing beside me holding her pajamas which she had taken out of her drawer after pulling a chair up to it so she could reach.  I probably said, "just a minute, I'm almost done, I can't right now, my hands are dirty!" one hundred times.  For awhile Milo was handing on my legs and screaming so I held him as I transferred a batch of Roma's between the boiling pan and the ice bath. 



Oh, and don't look over my shoulder and try to forget back in January when I had a New Year's resolution to stop piling stuff on top of the fridge...

In other news, when we returned from the long Labor Day weekend we noticed that Ben's sunflower, the one I thought might die, had bloomed!  Dang, is that thing tall.  It probably grew a foot in the last week before it bloomed. 

I have some good pictures from Labor Day but I will save those for another day this week.  Or maybe will...the best laid plans...