Food porn: Home-grown tomatoes

Every year I plant around 10 tomato plants in late February or early March. Our local informal NAFTA representative tills the ground, and I go to Home Depot for tomatoes and the few annual herbs we grow (most are perennial), plant them, and install the drip system. We get our first tomato around the 4th of July, and from sometime toward the end of July through August, we have an amazing bounty. The picture above is one picking last August. Then it tapers off, and we get one or two tomatoes a week sometimes through the following January.

We eat enough tomatoes in August to suffer from lycopene overdose. We eat them sliced, as soup, roasted, baked-stuffed, in salads, in tapenades, and as an ingredient in any dish where we have room in the pot. Imagine a leg of lamb or pork roast cut up in chunks, slow-roasted for hours with onions and tomatoes, with carrots and potatoes tossed in for the last 45 minutes. Then boil down the liquid for a sauce.

We give some to the neighbors and friends (but not that many, because we're greedy in the CDRealist household), and we always host our book club in July and August, partly because we have a small inside but+ a big outside, so it needs to be warm when we  host, and also so we can serve fresh tomato everything.

The ones we don't eat or give away, I use a melon baller to pop out the stem and any other bad spots, put them one layer deep in in gallon freezer bags, and freeze them until time for them to become soup or sauce. I used to blanch and de-skin them first, but it's not necessary. After you thaw them, you have the skins, a little pulp, and 95% liquid. If you run it through a colander, the pulp goes through, but the skins and seeds do not. Or you can just drop it all in the soup pot and pick out the skins with tongs.

My basic winter soup recipe is:

1. Sweat some onion in olive oil, maybe some mushrooms or leeks, a little salt. 
2. Add chicken stock (I love grocery store roast chicken. Not only is it tasty and convenient, but you end up with all those chicken carcasses, which make great stock. I usually keep tossing them in the freezer until I can't fit anything else in, then I drag out the 18-quart stock pot my partner got me for Christmas a few years ago, and make a couple of gallons of stock, and put two cups at a time into freezer bags to become soup in the fullness of time.) 
3. Add a bag of home-grown tomato juice, de-skinned. 
4. Chop up and add whatever vegetables my partner and I like that look good that day in the store or the farmer's market. 
5. Add some meat, frequently roast chicken pulled off the bone, which gives me another carcass for the freezer. 
6. For variety, I might add some rice, bulgar, or noodles. 
7. When I want to get fancy, I caramelize some red onions, with maybe with a little balsamic, and put a little on a disk of goat cheese on top of the soup. 

Or you can boil down a bag of tomatoes to a cup of liquid and make that the basis of a sauce. Mix that with, oh, say, the de-fatted drippings from a pot roast or a chicken stock that has deglazed a pan that has seared lamb blade chops, and you have umami heaven.