If you don’t follow me on Instagram (frangrit), you probably missed the comment-inducing photo of my dining table coated in a layer of ripening plum tomatoes. Yes, covered. Dan’s rough estimations put the tomato count at somewhere between 300 and 400. That is a lot of tomatoes.

The thing is, a hurricane was barreling up the coast. It was imperative that I pick them before they became waterlogged and ravaged by the wind. So, one afternoon I spent a few hours in the tomato beds at the farm, and hauled out two five-gallon buckets full of blushing tomatoes. Farmer Don assured me they’d ripen off the vine — “on your porch” was what he said, and I should be so lucky as to have a porch that sunlight actually reaches (have you seen my backyard?). But they ripened just fine on the table in the sunniest room in the house, and Dan and I were content — somewhat — to eat our dinner on the coffee table in the living room, seated on the floor, with the dog peering hungrily over our shoulders.

Sadly, some of these tomatoes were lost to some spotty rot, but I managed to salvage almost all of them, or cut out the less offensive spots. Then, just like last year, I proceeded to roast, sauce, and can them over a period of two weeks.

Tonight, the weather calls for a frost, so this is probably the very last I’ll see of tomatoes for another ten months. Goodbye, my darlings; I loved you so!

Oven-roasted plum tomatoes with thyme and garlic.

I don’t know what else to call it.

It’s hard to explain why, a mere 48 hours before I’m due to leave on a long-weekend trip, I’d wander into the fields at my CSA farm and haul out another twenty-five pound bag of plum tomatoes. (You might remember the first twenty-five pounds—they’re resting nicely in one of my kitchen cabinets now.)

I only meant to pick a few. Really! But then the farm apprentice gestured to the five-gallon buckets they keep on hand for picking, and suggested I take one. “But I’ve already picked a full bucketful,” I protested weakly. He explained that there were enough plum tomatoes for people to have second bucketfuls, and who was I to decline? Indeed, in the field, the vines were overladen with ripe tomatoes and the picking took me all of about fifteen minutes.

And then several hours later, my sink looked something like this:

Right. This is about a third of the full load.

Since I’d already canned and frozen the first twenty-five pounds, I figured I’d roast these. I highly encourage you to do the same—roasting intensifies the tomatoes’ sweetness and gives them a bit of depth. And it makes your house smell deliriously good. For recipes, I’d like to direct your attention to my western Mass neighbors Eating from the Ground Up (a slow, low roast) and Happy Valley Locavore (a hot, fast roast and sauce). I split my batch in half, roughly, used one recipe for each portion, and stuck everything in the freezer. Time-consuming, but easy.

Here’s a wicked little suggestion: instead of olive oil on a tray or two, dot each tomato half with a little bit of butter. Amazing.

Now, to scrub the pans…

It’s a little bit tomato-centric around here. Specifically, cherry-tomato-centric. I don’t know how it happened, but I returned home from the farm last week with what seemed like a truckload of sweet Sungold cherry tomatoes, and it was important that I figure out a way to get them preserved, stat. Because as much as I might want to, it just wouldn’t be a good idea for me to sit down and simply eat them all.

I’d been eyeing the oven dried tomatoes recipe in Put ‘Em Up, and this seemed like a good place to put it to the test. That the recipe called for plum tomatoes didn’t bother me. Instead of pruney little tomato nuggets, I’d end up with raisin-sized, snackable little tomato chips. What I plan to do with them is another story entirely, because I have no clue—really.

I tossed half of them into the freezer, and the other half  I packed into a jar with some extra-virgin olive oil. I figured that after a few days of steeping, the oil would become tomato-infused, and might be nice to drizzle over…well, anything. (I’m keeping it in the fridge in the meantime.)

Those of you who have made dried tomatoes, what did you do with them? How did you incorporate them into winter recipes? Could I soak them a bit and toss them with pasta? What about in a hearty farro or barley salad with herbs? Soups?

Ideas, please, before I eat them all out of hand like tiny sweet potato chips. Oh, and by the way: this recipe will make your entire house smell divine.

1/4 cup dill and 12 ounces halved red grape tomatoes

Just wanted to pop in here to point out that it was still technically summer, despite the cloudy mood Ms. Nature seems to be in, and despite the fact that for three nights in a row I was required to haul out the down comforter before bed. (But is there anything better than sleeping under a thick comforter while a cool breeze blows in through the window? Not much. Not in my book.)

See them floating innocently there? Little do they know what I will do with them.

If the tomato vines in your garden look anything like the ones at my CSA, you might be concerned that tomato season is coming to an end. In the spirit of saving the summer and converting some ho-hum grape tomatoes into something a little more fun, I present to you this recipe for quick-pickled tomatoes. I should say, though, that it wasn’t exactly my idea, but was instead spurred on by a fantastic tasting pickled tomato I sampled at a friend’s house before heading out to pick up my farm share. My friend mentioned that she’d been using the pickled tomatoes in martinis, and I imagined her and her husband lounging on their front porch, feet up, sun streaming in, cool mountain breezes blowing by, chilled martini glasses dangling effortlessly in their hands.

Let me tell you, it sounded appealing.

A nice gin to use for your martini would be Berkshire Mountain Distillers’ Ethereal—it’s good, and I’m not a gin person.

These easy pickled tomatoes, then, are my last plea to summer. This weekend’s weather will be warm, and I’ll sit in the yard and soak it up, martini glass in hand, pickled tomato infusing its dilly goodness into the drink. Care to join me?

Coring and peeling twenty pounds of tomatoes — a fun job for Dano.

We’d only been talking about doing it for, I don’t know, five or so years. Canning tomatoes. Preserving that bright, acidic summertime flavor for purely homemade sauce all winter long. Canned tomatoes are one of the few processed items we buy anymore — our utter dependence on Friday night pizzas requires some decent tomatoes, even in February.

One down, many to go.

When I got the email last week from our CSA that canning tomatoes were starting to ripen, I jumped. Now was our chance. Last Friday, out in the field, I picked about twenty pounds of beautiful red plum tomatoes. My parents, who had come to visit and to spend an evening at Tanglewood, were put into service. We scrubbed the kitchen. We ran the quart jars through the diswasher. We boiled up water in the biggest pot we could find.

We finally canned tomatoes.

And though we weren’t around to hear the delightful little ping of the jar lids making their final seal, when we checked them in the morning, they looked great and seemed sealed. It was all I could do to keep from cracking them open then and there.

Canned tomatoes! I can’t believe we did it.

Almost ready for the hot water bath.

Now I wonder why we waited so long. It was easy, and even fun. We used the recipe from Storey’s Put ‘Em Up for canned whole tomatoes. You can also download a PDF of the USDA’s entire canning guide at foodsaving.com — or just download the tomatoes section.

Go on, try it.

Our CSA is in the height of U-pick season: the time of year when the distribution area in the barn is eerily empty because everyone is out in the field, ankle-deep in dirt, harvesting pint after pint of raspberries, cherry tomatoes, tomatillos, husk cherries, and whatever else is boisterously bearing fruit.

When we signed up for our share this year, one thing we were most excited about was the possibility of picking our own tomatoes for canning. By “canning” I mean freezing, because I’m still somewhat afraid of the (very great) possibility of completely screwing up the canning process and, as a result, poisoning myself, Dan, and anyone else who’s dared to take a meal with us. The plum tomatoes are suddenly ripe for the taking, so this week I happily marched into the fields with a five gallon spackle bucket and proceeded to pick plum tomatoes in the company of several happy bumble bees and grandmothers. “Happy picking,” said the farm apprentice, as I trotted out of the distribution area, bucket in hand. “And happy canning!” she added somewhat ominously.

Here’s where I note another sort of “worst of both worlds” moment. Really, it’s the same root problem borne out over many moments: living here, in the country, trying to do some country things, without the community of support that comes, I suppose, with living here for a long, long time.

Which is to say that it was damn hard — and time consuming — to turn 14 pounds of plum tomatoes into a giant vat of tomato sauce.

Really, it was the chopping. Oh, the endless, merciless chopping. As I quartered and diced the tomatoes, I thought about what it might have been like three or four generations ago: if my grandmother — or, more likely, Dan’s — had been processing tomatoes for canning, what might it have looked like? I imagined a hot kitchen, aproned women with braids or short, simple hairdos; friends, aunts, generations, all chopping together, piling those translucent red chunks in a big ceramic bowl. You know the saying, many hands…

I don’t know what it was like for people before me, or what it’s like for people now, people who are old hands, people with a network of canning-savvy pals ready to spend the weekend gossiping in the kitchen while turning summer into something they can use in the white-out of January. Instead, I made the task a sort of Zen exercise:

Halve
Slice, slice, slice
Dice
Scoop

and before too terribly long, I was done.

The reward? (Aside from a knife-induced repetitive stress injury?) In the now, the still-lingering aroma of tomatoes, garlic, onion, and basil. And in January — if it lasts that long — the sweet taste of summer tomatoes.

You should have seen the bag of tomatoes we foisted on the poor market fellow. It must have weighed at least six pounds. I hope it weighed at least six pounds, because it was expensive. Heirloom tomatoes: so delicious, so pricey.

So when I got home yesterday afternoon, and examined our market purchases, it seemed the best thing to do with those new potatoes and firm, fresh tomatoes would be to make a small gratin. The recipe I followed, sort of, was from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, my dog-eared, stained, wrinkled kitchen staple. Her gratin was more Provençal, but since I didn’t have thyme, and lemons are in no way local, I used the basil and parsely I had on hand. (I did use the olives, though. I couldn’t resist the olives.)

Dan and I gobbled up the entire gratin. The whole thing! It had the kind of stunning, sweet, fresh taste that makes you happy to be alive. I couldn’t believe it had come out of the oven! I remember thinking to myself that if kids ate like this, they’d love vegetables. Love them. Who knows, though–I’ve always loved vegetables. I could have a warped perspective.

In any case, we also had wonderful, simple salad of mixed baby greens, spicy sprouts, and blue cheese from Jasper Hill Farm. I attempted to cook a beet in the microwave, to have with our salad, but it was a disaster which ended up shorting out the microwave and producing an acrid plume of smoke. Will continue to roast beets the old-fashioned way.

Finally, we topped it all off with a homemade, nearly all-local peach ice cream, which I couldn’t photograph properly in the post-sundown kitchen under the CFL bulbs. (Does anyone else have this problem? Everything looks horrid under those lights, no matter how I try to adjust the white balance.)

The custard-based ice cream recipe was from Cook’s Illustrated, and we found it just a bit too sweet and intense, so we’ll be reworking it for the next batch. But fresh ice cream? I really can’t complain.

- Heirloom tomatoes [Walloomsac Farmers' Market - Bennington, VT - 18 mi]
- Fingerling potatoes [same]
- Basil [Williamstown Farmers' Market - Williamstown, MA - 5 mi]
- Parsley [Melanie & Jay's garden - Plainfield, MA - 21 mi]
- Spicy sprouts [Gill Greenery - Gill, MA - 45 mi]
- Baby salad greens [Mighty Food Farm - Pownal, VT - 10 mi]
- Bayley Hazen blue cheese [Jasper Hill Farm - Greensboro, VT - 192 mi]

Decidedly not local: kalamata olives, EVOO, salt, pepper, vinegar

Summer, all the way.

We started the day with breakfast at the Blue Benn, an old school diner car in Bennington, VT. I love old diners, but they so rarely offer things I’d actually want to eat. The Blue Benn is different. Sure, they serve the traditional diner fare–omelettes, pancakes, sausage, bacon, biscuits–but it’s all extremely well-prepared, and they supplement their standard menu with hundreds of specials, like tofu scramble or veggie chili, for the visiting hippie-dippies.

Next up, the small-but-packed farmers’ market, where we spent more money than I’d care to admit on tomatoes. Some of them are in the oven now, in a tomato-and-new-potato gratin. Yep, I have the oven on, and it’s not that hot.

During the afternoon, we took Bix out to Savoy Mt. State Forest and we all swam together in the big, beautiful pond, with children shrieking and kayaks gliding all around. Let me tell you, there isn’t much better than having a swim with your new, sexy husband, and your water-loving dog on a clear, hot day in northwestern Massachusetts.

I finished out my Holga roll, and started a new one. The sun’s setting, Dan’s drawing, and I’m drinking a beer.

Summer.