Tomatoes, tomatoes everywhere!

Wow.

Every time I walk down the driveway, I have to stop and say a prayer of thanks for the miracle of how seeds grow into plants and how plants make fruit. I'm talking about our wonderful Jaune Flamme tomatoes—about the size of apricots, orange-y gold in color, and sweet, sweet, sweet inside. We are getting cascades of them, suddenly too many to eat in salads. But not enough to do the whole Canning Thing.

So I've been reading up on food preservation. Heres what I've learned:

One article suggested cooking tomatoes into a nice sauce (with your favorite herbs & spices added), making a puree and then freezing the puree in ice cube trays. You transfer your tomato sauce cubes into freezer bags, and you have wonderful saucey tomatoes to add to soups, stews, casseroles, whatever, in the fall.

I read several articles about drying the tomatoes in a 200-degree oven (kind of like accelerated sun-drying). The articles argue with each other about whether or not to peel and seed the tomatoes, whether you should blanch them before drying them (definitely not! definitely yes! who knows?!?!), and so forth.

I'm trying (even as we speak) my first batch in the oven according to the method in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle which is pretty simple, I think. No peeling, no seeding, no blanching. Just dry them in single layers on cookie sheets until leathery but not crispy. I've discovered that arriving at the correct texture/density is very dependent on how thick the tomato was, whether you quartered it or halved it, and whether it was ripe, semi-ripe or heading toward overripe.

One thing's for sure: right now my house smells like essence of tomato... and if I touch one of the partially dried tomato halves (did I mention it takes about 10 hours?) the sticky-sweet extract of tomato is almost like molasses. Wow, again.

Once the tomato halves are leathery, not at all moist, and completely cooled, one can supposedly put them in plastic zipper bags for storage. Here again the "experts" differ on how long these bags are safe. "A few months." Hmmmmm. The dried tomatoes can be resuscitated in a little olive oil and used in pasta dishes, pizza, sandwiches, whatever. And the oil, so I'm told, makes a good basis for a vinaigrette.

I've only ever canned anything once (pickles, and boy were they good - but boy did I have help!) so I'm a tad bit afraid of poisoning my family with these things.

I leave you with this link to a wonderful tomato storage manual. Please do check it out. It will make you smile.