Nice long, quiet weekend, and you know what that means: an opportunity to revise a bunch of lectures. I’ve taught all the classes for this semester before, I’ve got lectures in the can, but that just means I should turn them inside out in order to make them better. Can’t settle for what just works.
On top of that, this is the time of year when Mary’s garden is exploding with ripe tomatoes, which I’m expected to cook down and get stored away for the winter. So many tomatoes…so much tomato sauce. We better love Italian, because we’re going to be swimming in the stuff.
We have to cultivate a taste for zucchini, cucumber, and squash, too.
I’m very envious of Mary’s cornicopious output!
This is me: https://www.theonion.com/full-summer-of-tending-backyard-garden-produces-single-1819578178
That said, I think I need to remember I moved to a warmer country… am planning to start planting tomatoes in February now. Let’s see what next summer brings, then I may give up and try flowers instead.
Tomatoes are pretty much what food is!
When I was a kid tomatoes were a thing. Every year we’d make and bottle a large batch of passata that we’d eat all year. I was always worried that we’d have leftover, or a tomato overflow disaster because each successful year mom would plant more (in terms of # of stalks) tomatoes, until we were swimming in the damn things.
Meanwhile, I caught myself thinking “next year I’ll plant more!”
Time for gazpacho!
PS, zucchini goes well in gazpacho, too.
For your cucumbers, you can throw some of them (and tomatoes) into this recipe:
https://www.topsmarkets.com/Recipes/Detail/8584/Dinosaur_Bar-b-que_Tomato_Cucumber_Salad
For the zucchini, I like to make little zucchini patties from one of the zucchini tots recipes (making them patties gives a higher surface to volume ratio, so they crisp up better.) We use a ricer lined with a paper towel to help squeeze out the maximum amount of liquid we can from the grated zucchini first. The dryer you get it, the crisper they’ll cook up. Not sure if this is the base recipe we started with (we kind of wing it now) but it seems close.
https://www.skinnytaste.com/zucchini-tots/
Twelve years ago, the Republicans voted pizzas* could be bought to schools since the red stuff on top was a vegetable.
This was just after the Tea Party had gone to Washington to “stop waste”.
*Provided by companies that made campaign contributions.
@ 5
I meant , apropos tomatoes. Just about everything reminds me of corruption.
Chef John must have been spying on you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HNAtAT-2IU
For fresh tomatoes and cucmber, I recommend salad shirazi.
Zucchini and Squash are great in tomato sauce. Just sayin’
Tomatoes, zucchini, squash? I learned too late in life that Ratatouille is awesome! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyba8LzaL7I
Do tomatoes go with fermented herring?
Only thing I’m growing is purslane. Which is a weed growing in my houseplants . But it’s edible