More and more tomatoes

After all the tomatoes that I picked and processed the last weekend of August, I went a little nuts and got another 25-pound box of tomatoes that I picked up last Friday. Which was after me and Jasper went to the Wednesday market and bought 10 pounds of tomatoes to make two tomato pies for a dinner party on Friday night. I mean the picked up tomatoes were after the Wednesday purchase but before the dinner.

Anyways, here’s the pies. It’s a recipe by Lauren Rudersdorf, who wrote recipes for my CSA before I did and has a blog called the Leek and the Carrot. I mean the blog’s still there and I think Lauren still lives on a vegetable farm but I think she has moved on to different career(s). I liked the recipe but I did a few things differently. I used plum tomatoes cut into wedges and probably about 3 1/2 pounds per pie rather than 5. I minced the shallots and put them in with the mayonaise and cheese – I thought they’d burn on top of the pie, baking for 45 minutes. And I just could not pour the full 12 tablespoons of browned butter, 6 TBLS per pie, over the tops of the pies. I used more like 2-3 tablespoons per pie. Which meant I had lovely browned butter garlic butter to make Marcella Hazen’s tomato-butter sauce the next day. More on that in a minute.

 

The dinner party was pretty great, too. I think 10 is the optimum number for my black table with both leaves put in. And a lot of the time it was like one big conversation with the whole table.

I told everyone I was making the pies and bars for dessert and they should bring salads and ice cream and drinks. Which they did. Jane brought a green salad and Heike brought cucumbers and goat cheese with lots of herbs, and even though I said I wouldn’t make any salad, I made a broccoli salad with toasted pepitas and almonds and dried cranberries. Because we were about to go out of town and I wanted to use the broccoli. It wasn’t quite enough broccoli and I had a little cucumber to use, so I diced that up and threw it in too. I made Bronwen Wyatt’s spiced carrot cake blondies and my regular brownie recipe. Max & Pat brought apple pie ice cream from chocolate shop that  perfect match with the blondies. Andy and Deena brought a bunch of ice cream that they made and there was a Guinness chocolate that was perfect with the brownies.

On Saturday and Sunday I processed tomatoes. I made a medium salsa (using a bunch of cilantro I had bought forgetting that I didn’t have many dinners to cook before we went to Door County), and roasted tomato sauce with lots of parsley (using the extra roasted tomatoes that didn’t fit in the pies, plus more, and parsley that I’d bought for the pies), and Marcella sauce with the garlic browned butter mentioned above. No pics.

On Saturday I didn’t go to the Farmers Market, I did my arboretum bike ride and said hi to the turkeys.

On Sunday I roasted some tomatoes. The blank spots are the ones that I thought were a little dark, and I ate them. The rest are in the freezer now. And there’s still a big bucket of tomatoes in the fridge waiting for me. I think their fate is spaghetti sauce and more roasted.

And in more using up stuff, we had breakfast burritos for Sunday brunch. Made kind of differently than I usually do because I had small tortillas. I fried finely diced potatoes with a little green pepper and onion, and scrambled some eggs with goat cheese and white cheddar and we assembled our own. We ate them with the medium salsa and some milder sweeter stuff I made during my first tomatoes processing event.

Also on Sunday we went to see Gillian Welch & Dave Rawlings at Orpheum. It was a really good show, no time to tell you about it now. Here’s setlistfm.

And here’s Jasper’s first granny daycare day of September, when we played with analog dinos, plastic ones I retrieved from the basement and plush, the one I got at IKEA and the other one is actually an alligator he brought with him, but we called it a dino.

I didn’t tell Jasper these dinos were his Daddy’s but they were.

OK, that’s enough tomatoes for now, up next – Door County.