40 Pounds of Tomatoes

Saturday Donovan and I processed 40 pounds of tomatoes for the freezer. These were the tomatoes he and Nate picked up at Atlas Farm--40 lbs of organic tomatoes for $24. We got seconds, but as far as I could tell, most of what made them seconds was cosmetic blemishes on the skin. A fantastic deal.

Last year I froze a load of tomatoes by the easiest method possible--sticking them straight into the freezer. This method works great and is a fantastic time saver on this end. The down side is that it requires more time on the other end, when you're ready to cook with them. So this year I decided to experiment with some greater processing before freezing--definitely more time required on this end, but hopefully lots of time saved when cooking. We cored, blanched, peeled, and seeded, then packed into freezer bags. To do 40 pounds took a whole afternoon, though it would have been faster with two people working at once (we had to take shifts). This amount of tomatoes resulted in packages for 18 meals--a good quantity, but still less than we would need at our typical rate of usage. So we may yet do some more. Time is always the limiting factor.