cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1803373
Man, if you ever want to eat 10,000 tomatoes in a season, plant yourself a Spoon Tomato.
I made the mistake of growing two of these last summer, and each grew up, over, and across the length of my trellis arch, about 20’ in length. To keep them from utterly smothering their neighbors required pruning fistfuls of vines literally daily.
It’s insanely prolific in fruits too, I gave up harvesting them all when I was picking hundreds a day. That sounds great, but each is the size of a pea or smaller, and they had the tendency to split at the top rather than keeping their caps, so they didn’t store well at all.
The flipside is they do have a great tart, intense tomato flavor. I mostly ate them as garden snacks, or sprinkled on salads or focaccia.
[Image description: a small metal spoon holding a dozen tiny, bright red round cherry tomatoes. Green tomatoes and flowers are seen on the vine adjacent to the spoon.]
Toss them in a pot and simmer them down part way, then press them through a colander to remove the skins. Then simmer the non-skin stuff some more. Depending on how much you want to be involved, you can do soup, marinara, pizza sauce, etc.
Honestly, what I do when I get overwhelmed with tomatoes is to simmer them all down to tomato paste, then I freeze it in an ice cube tray. I can get like 3 gallons of crushed tomatoes down to like 15-20 ice cubes, and I freeze them and move them into a large Ziploc. Then anytime I need tomato anything, it’s there. I can use it as is, reconstitute with water to make sauce, puree, whatever. And then I can use the paste/puree/sauce to make marinara or pizza sauce or whatever.
It’s not as satisfying as eating them fresh, but less stressful than trying to keep up with infinite produce and getting sick of it - I learned my lesson from lettuce month!