Juggling tomatoes

Crispy, fried tomato skins--They're not so pretty, but they're yummy!

I don't know about the rest of the country, but in our corner of the world, the tomatoes came late and they came with a vengeance. For the past month, my CSA has included at least three kinds of tomatoes in each share, sometimes four. And the farmers' market is simply blooming with all shapes, colors, and sizes of tomatoes. They look like colorful baroque pearls on a late summer morning.

Sounds florid, perhaps, but my emotions about tomatoes run even higher in early spring, when the first hothouse specimens seem like hope itself. But this over-abundance has turned almost slapstick, like an I Love Lucy episode. What can three people do with pounds and pounds of tomatoes each week? I guess I could can them or make chutney preserves, but my skills and equipment aren't there yet, and Laurel doubts whether it's even worthwhile. So I've just been using them up as fast as I can.

How fast can I juggle? Well, I've made cold sungold tomato soup, beef/vegetable tomato soup, regular vegetable tomato soup, cold gazpacho, roasted tomatoes and peppers (in soup or with eggplant and olives on spaghetti), tomato sauce for pizza, slow-roasted tomatoes with coriander seeds, tomatoes in bruschetta, and of course, tomatoes in salads (but fewer of these since my own Sweet One Hundreds vines dried up). I've long since mastered the technique of making a small X in the bottom of a fresh tomato and plunging it into boiling water for ten seconds, so that it will be easy to peel. And this summer, I've mastered the food mill. But I confess that I've also dropped a tomato or two, overripe, into the trash can.

But not to be found overly wasteful, I've found a nice use for not only the tomatoes themselves, but the tomato skins. This technique is from Deborah Madison's Local Flavors* (p. 183, in the eggplant/tomato/pepper section, naturally), and goes along with the tomato/vegetable soup shown below. I won't include the whole soup recipe, since it's long, but I simply spread the loose skins out in hot oil in an iron skillet, fry until crisp, and sprinkle with salt (I like that big, flaky Maldon salt for this). Wow!

Now that I know how delicious fried tomato skins are, I've been using them for other things. Last night I had a bunch of skins left over from making tomato sauce for pizza, so I just placed a few in with the other pizza toppings, and they were a really nice addition.

Of course, now that I post this, fall is almost here and the tomatoes will soon be gone. So, try it this week, or try it next summer, or, if you live down South, you've probably still got a while to enjoy tomatoes--lucky you!

Next year, I vow to find more good uses for basil.

Late-season Tomato-Vegetable Soup (from Deborah Madison's Local Flavors),

before adding the tomatoes

*My only caveat about this otherwise extremely useful cookbook is that the pages fall out. So get a used hardback version if you can find it.