Tag: Cooking

Nine Things To Do With Your Extra Tomatoes

Tomatoes in our garden

If you planted some tomatoes last spring and have had a good year you might have more of the juicy red crop than you know what to do with. It has been another great gardening year for us here on the acreage and we are starting to employ some of these ideas ourselves.

Eat more. We have them with our daily fruit and vegetable plate and have been adding them to other meals. Today I diced up one and added it to our scrambled eggs.

Freeze them. So far we have put up a dozen quart freezer baggies. Great to thaw out during the colder months and add to soups and stews.

Can them. We haven’t done this in a few years, but we still have all our canning equipment if needed.

Make homemade V8 juice. In the past I have made enough to last two or three days then made another batch. Click here for a recipe or search for a different version online.

Make chili. Here is my recipe.

Make salsa. As with the homemade V8 I only make small batches because I am not using any additives or preservatives.

Give them away to friends, family and neighbors. One of our neighbors reciprocates with a full bag of sweet corn each year.

Give them to a homeless shelter.

Put up a roadside stand. Try charging just over or just under store prices.

What do you do with your extra tomatoes?

Recipes, Cooking and Gardening

Some of our recipe books

Once a month I will share a recipe, a post about cooking or one about gardening. On a previous blog I posted around 30 of our family’s favorite recipes, so they would be archived and available for use. I won’t repeat those recipes on this blog, so here is a link to them if you are interested.

For this month I want to share a cooking tip I learned a few years back about homemade soup. I imagine most of you already know this, but for the few that might not it can really make a difference. After your homemade soup is fully cooked choose a can of cream soup that most closely parallels the type or flavor of your soup. Add the cream soup to a blender, throw in some shredded or cubed cheese and then fill the remainder with ladles of the soup you have just cooked. Blend it and then pour the contents into your homemade soup to make a thicker, cheesy version. I have also added a leftover diced baked potato or a package of instant potatoes to the blender ingredients.

Bon Appétit!