About to Feel Saucy, I Think

I have six one-gallon bags of tomatoes in the freezer, cored out and ready for making tomato sauce. I hear once you defrost a frozen tomato, the skin slides right off, and I'm not worried about the seeds, really.

Not sure what this will translate to in terms of cooked down and canned sauce/pureed/crushed tomatoes. I think I'm going to segregate the Limmony from the others because I think I have enough of them to make at least a quart of sauce, and I've never had a golden tomato sauce to play with. Could make a pretty awesome pizza sauce, I'll bet.



The rest I may cook down quite a bit, because some varieties like Mortgage Lifter are in the freezer in part because they're too bland for a slice-and-eat tomato in my opinion. Next year, that slot is probably going to be taken by a second Kellog's Breakfast, a variety that is so tasty I don't think any of them ended up in the freezer. One last KB is ripening on the counter and I'll probably make a final batch of BLTs with it.

But Mortgage Lifter cooked down and concentrated, could be pretty good stuff, I'll bet. And if it still lacks zip, I'll make Diablo sauce with some of my Thai and Kung Pao chillis and who will ever know the tomatoes lacked umph?



Another reason to grow more tomatoes: my Thai and Kung Pao plants have produced enough blazing hot pods, drying happily on my counter, to make approximately three metric tons of Diablo sauce hot enough for a Man vs. Food challenge.

Next year's garden will probably also include three or four Paul Robeson plants. There might be one or two PRs in the freezer, but basically that one is so delicious I've been able to keep up with it all summer: they get ripe, they get eaten, raw with a sprinkling of salt or tossed in a salad. Wouldn't mind having enough of them to make a sauce out of nothing but Paul Robesons, I bet that sauce would be Rush in Rio meets the Super Bowl.

Good thing about the sauce bags, too, some of the tomatoes I'm getting are only half edible. The fugly ones can be carved up to harvest the stuff I can recognize as tomato and the rest can go on the compost pile.



I grilled some chicken breast this evening, and got the notion to grill a couple of my jalapeños and some pear tomatoes. Which reminded me why I never make kabobs. I thought of cubing one of the breasts to make some, figuring to skewer some Beam's Yellow Pear, a couple of runtish Gigant Pelinas and maybe an Isis Candy or a smallish Paul Robeson with some California Wonder bell pepper quarters and onion and whatnot.

But I don't have any kabob skewers. One bite into a piping hot, fresh off the grill, pear tomato reminded me why. From the age of, I think, ten, when I first encountered kabobs, I've wondered, who in the hell wants to eat a hot tomato?



It's not the same as a tomato sauce, it's not like a fresh tomato. I think I'd rather eat a tomato icy cold from the fridge than hot off the grill. And that's saying something, because tomatoes belong in the fridge about like I belong in an Ultimate Cage Fight.



The jalapeños weren't bad grilled, in fact I could have easily eaten a half dozen of them, especially combined with a bite of chicken and a bit of raw bell pepper or a slice of raw Carbon tomato.