Yardening

End of season tomatoes have always been a conundrum for me. I don’t love eating green tomatoes, neither relished nor fried, (I guess I’m not a good Southerner 😬) but it pains me to throw them all in the compost. So, this year I decided to donate this table space – my own office area table sacrificed to a good cause – and see what happens.

I did three different things. I put about 30 in a paper bag with some bananas destined for the bread pan, I left about 200 in a bin sitting in the sun, and I spread about 50 on the table. All of these get morning sun for about two hours. Over the course of two weeks, tomatoes ripened. 🥰 The bag did only minimally better than table and bin. The tomatoes you see were all green when they entered the house. It includes tomatoes from all three groups.

But the experiment is no good without a taste test. So last night, I made marinara. About half of the tomatoes I used were red when they entered the house and the other half were from the green stash. I found that quite a few from the original greens were not as meaty and red as their external color would indicate. Also, some of them were not an awesome texture, some hard-ish, some mealy-ish. In the marinara, once cooked and puréed the texture wasn’t that silky smooth texture that my mid season marinaras had. I also had some in a salad. The texture was fine, but the flavor was about half as delectable as mid season tomatoes.

Conclusion: late season tomatoes are fine, but not awesome. They’re more like what you can get at the grocery store year round. Edible, but a ghost of what’s possible. I imagine these will be made into chilis and stews, possibly salsa, with seasoning kicked up a bit. Maybe if I add tomato powder it won’t taste like it comes from the grocery store. 🧐 One can only hope. And experiment.