Slow-Roasting Tomatoes

I don’t know that I’ve ever met a tomato recipe I haven’t liked, but there are some that I love more than others. One of my favorite ways to enjoy summer tomatoes is by slow-roasting them in the oven. You can throw these on pizza, on salads, eat them plain or my favorite, on top of some toast with an egg. When you slow roast tomatoes it deepens the flavor and concentrates the sugars. As a result you’re left with delicious jammy little puddles of tomato goodness, and making them couldn’t be simpler! This is even a great way to deal with so-so tomatoes that you buy from the store or the end of the season tomatoes that are ripened indoors and lack the sun-ripened flavor.

You can use any kind of tomato, from cherries to beefsteaks, just keep in mind that the larger the tomato the longer it will take to roast. Roma types that are dry roast quicker so check them earlier, but beefsteaks are more concentrated when roasted so they taste better. If you’re going to roast a batch, you may as well do an entire oven full to save energy and I guarantee you’ll always want more!

All you need to do it is cut the tomatoes in half, lay skin side down on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper (the parchment helps get them up later). If you want to, drizzle with olive oil and some freshly chopped herbs and sprinkle with salt and pepper, or simply roast as is, it’s up to you, I do both. Roast in a 225 degree oven for 4-8 hours or until reduced in size and slightly moist, cooking time depends on size of tomatoes and your oven. You can try raising oven temp to 250, but you may get some dark spots on the tomatoes, it depends on your oven. I like to put mine in the oven before I go to bed and set the timer for 6 hours. The next morning I check the tomatoes, remove any that are finished and continue roasting any tomatoes that aren’t quite done. You can taste one after 3-4 hours and you’ll be able to tell if it’s done or not. It should taste like concentrated tomato with a slightly sweet tang. If it’s still acidic and sour, roast for a while longer.

These will need to be frozen to preserve them. I usually freeze on the cookie sheets, then store in a large bag. That way can I get one or twenty depending on what I’m making. I like to use slow-roasted tomatoes in my homemade ketchup, I find it adds a wonderful rich flavor and reduces the cooking time. I don’t roast them quite as long as when I do this since it’s much easier to extract the peels and seeds when they’re not quite as dry.

Have you ever slow roasted tomatoes?

Preserving Lemon Verbena

Last year I bought a lemon verbena plant and overwintered it in the basement. This summer it’s really taken off so I have an abundance of it. I’ve been looking for ways to use this lovely lemony herb so that none of it goes to waste. It’s a wonderful way to bring some summer flavor into the long cold winter months here in Ohio. One of the best ways I’ve found is by add diced fresh leaves to recipes, like scones, cakes or cookies, but you can’t do that in winter. Lemon verbena dries beautifully and retains it’s flavor, so you can easily add some to your winter teas if you have a stash of dried leaves in the pantry.

Lemon verbena cooler is especially refreshing after a hot afternoon or gardening. To make: pick a handful of lemon verbena leaves, tear or chop and add to a pitcher full of water, steep overnight and enjoy the next day. If you like a little sweetness, add sugar before drinking. You can also make lemon verbena syrup to use in mixed drinks, as flavoring for ice cream, desserts and just about anywhere a lemony flavor would be welcome. I find that lemon verbena is quite delicious when added to jams and jellies. Simply add a few leaves when cooking down the berries, strain out and process as desired.

Lemon verbena can also be used to infuse sugar with a lemony flavor. I can think of many places a lemony sugar would be welcome, particularly in ice cream, iced tea, or other sweet treats like cookies and cakes. Of course you can also add a few vanilla beans to make a vanilla lemon sugar.

Lemon verbena leaves retain their scent when dried, so you can dry the leaves to use for flavoring and for potpourri to scent your home. You can also make a lemon verbena hair rinse by steeping a few lemon verbena leaves in a cup of hot water, then using to rinse hair after washing and conditioning. This leaves your hair with a wonderful lemony fresh scent.

I’m also experimenting with make lemon verbena liqueur. I’m steeping 1 1/2 cups of chopped lemon verbena in 4 cups of organic vodka. After 2 weeks I’ll be adding 2 cups of organic evaporated cane juice. I’m thinking this will be a great Christmas gift for friends that enjoy mixed beverages, being a rather dry person myself I won’t be consuming any.

I also made some lemon verbena syrup. Heat one cup of water until hot, then add 3/4 cup of evaporated cane juice and dissolve. Then added 1/2 cup of chopped lemon verbena leaves. Steep for an 30 minutes or so, then strain and refrigerate or can. Enjoy as a sweetener for teas, sauces, sweets or wherever you want a hint of lemon flavor.

What’s your favorite herb to save up for winter use?

Putting up Tomatoes for Winter Sauces

My tomatoes are finally starting to ripen up en masse as are the ones in my mom’s garden. I’ve been picking big bucketfuls of all colors shapes and sizes. When I see these sitting in the kitchen, I know exactly why I grow a variety of heirlooms, how beautiful!

On Sunday evening I worked well into the night canning up some tomatoes for enjoying this winter. I’m trying to focus more on eating seasonally and growing foods that don’t need to be preserved by canning, but tomatoes are an exception. I’ll always can tomatoes for making sauces and soups. I also dry a lot of tomatoes, but sometimes a rich hearty meat sauce is the perfect dinner, and I need canned tomatoes for that.

I can all of my tomatoes as crushed tomatoes, and I never remove the seeds. Some people say the seeds can make your tomatoes bitter, but I’ve never noticed that it does. I’ve read so many different directions for canning crushed tomatoes, some of them say to process them for an hour and half in a water bath canner. I follow the directions from this great brochure from the University of Georgia – Tomato Canning. I also use the directions from Well-Preserved.

What do I do? I simply peel the tomatoes and cut them up, add them to a large pan, heat them to boiling and continue to cook them for 5 minutes. Then I fill hot jars allowing a 1/2 to 3/4 inch head space (I find that with tomatoes you want your head space to be slightly more, never less than 1/2 inch). I add a basil leaf to each jar and add the lid and ring. Then I process in a water bath canner for 35 minutes for pints, 45 min for quarts. When processing time is finished, leave jars in canner with heat turned off for 5 minutes, then remove. I find that this step helps with sealing on tomatoes, they have a tendency to expand when you take them out the canner and kind of boil up.

Do you grow enough tomatoes to can? What’s your favorite way to preserve them for the winter?

Harvesting Potatoes

I harvested my ‘Red Gold’ potatoes from the front garden a few weeks ago. It always amazes me when I dig potatoes, you plant one small potato and dig up a bucketful. The yields in my garden are slightly smaller than the ones we harvested from my mom’s garden, but I wasn’t disappointed.

Red Gold: Bred by Ag-Canada at the University of Guelph in 1970. Beautiful reddish orange skin with creamy, golden-yellow, semi-moist flesh. Excellent variety for baking, frying, mashing, steaming or roasting. Good disease resistance, best used fresh, not recommended for extended storage. 90-100 days.

My mom and I also harvested the ‘Carola’, ‘All Red’, ‘All Blue’, and ‘Purple Viking’ that we planted in her garden. We were quite impressed with the yields, I think the total weighed in around 40 pounds for these varieties. It was quite fun to harvest such a colorful variety of potatoes. I got this collection from potato sampler from Seed Savers in the spring.

All Red: (a.k.a. Cranberry Red) Red skin with delicate pale pink flesh. Low starch content makes this variety a good boiling potato for salads or any dish that requires potatoes to retain their shape. Considered the best producing red-fleshed, red-skinned variety. Introduced to SSE members by Robert Lobitz in 1984. Consistently a good producer at Heritage Farm, regardless of the weather conditions. 90-110 days.

Carola: Our most popular variety. Heavy yields of medium-sized, rounded oval potatoes with straw-beige skin. Excellent when harvested as young new potatoes. Creamy yellow flesh, relatively low starch, great for soups, boiling or fried. Maintains new potato qualities for months in root cellar. 95 days.

All Blue: Deep blue skin, blue flesh with a thin white line just under the skin. A good choice for baking and frying, nice for making colorful chips. When boiled the color turns to a light blue. High mineral content, good keeper. 90-110 days.

Purple Viking: Quickly gaining the reputation of a great tasting, slightly sweet, general purpose potato. A choice variety for any preparation , snow-white flesh is excellent for mashing. Average tubers are 3½ – 4″ in diameter, but in a good year it can produce even larger tubers. Excellent storage qualities. 80-100 days.

So far I’ve tasted them all and they’re all quite good, I’ll try to post more in depth about this later. I especially like the All Reds, they’re very good and they had a great yield. We still need to harvest the ‘Kennebec’ and we harvested the fingerlings yesterday, more on those later. This winter I’ll be trying to decide what varieties I’ll be growing next year, perhaps all of these again, perhaps some new ones, once I get to eat a few more of them and see how they store I’ll make my decision.

Do you grow or eat a colorful variety of potatoes? How many varieties do you grow each year?

On My Windowsill

I’m enjoying seeing big beefsteak tomatoes sitting on my kitchen windowsill just waiting to be sliced up for a meal.

This is a lovely ‘White Beauty’ tomato, we’re also eating ‘Sub-Arctic’, ‘Chianti Rose’, and ‘Cherokee Purple’. No ripe ‘Brandywine’ tomatoes yet, I can’t wait for one of those, I think it will still be a few weeks. We enjoy them sliced, drizzled with a little olive oil and topped with some freshly ground salt (Himalayan pink salt at the moment).

What’s your favorite way to eat fresh tomatoes?