5 Tasty Ways to Eat Your Tomato Harvest All Year

By Blythe Copeland, TreeHugger

Hello tomato harvest time. If your garden (or farmer’s market, or neighbor’s garden) is suddenly overwhelming you with fresh tomatoes, don’t be intimidated, start filling the pantry.

Here are five ways to take advantage of the bright flavor of this fruit during the coldest days of winter.

1. Slow Roasted Tomato Sauce (above)

Tomato sauce is a no-brainer way to use up tomatoes, and this recipe calls for just a few simple ingredients — 5 pounds of overripe Romas, garlic, salt, basil, thyme, and olive oil — and basic technique: Jerry roasted his quartered tomatoes at 175 degrees overnight.

The National Center for Home Food Preservation details the procedure for preserving tomato sauce, but you can also just pop the sauce in the freezer (try putting it in airtight bags on cookie sheets to freeze it in a flat, space-saving shape).

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Kathy P.

8:43AM PDT on Oct 9, 2012

so awesome

October 9
send a green star

Sun R.

9:28PM PDT on Aug 30, 2012

In my country (Catalunya) we have a very good way of eating raw ripe tomatoes. It is really delicious. We take a loaf of Spanish bread, or a French baguette and we slice it open. We also cut the tomato in two. After that, we rub de tomato thoroughly all over the bread until the bread has a coat of tomato, with seed and pulp (that is why it must be very ripe). The next step is easy: add olive oil and salt at taste. With the "pa amb tomàquet" we can eat cheese, black or green olives, bacon, ham, omelette, anchovies or anything that takes your fancy.
It is a very usual way of entertaining friends-guests and the trickiest part is to have a big variety of things to choose from when we have guests. This is usually accompanyed by a nice bottle of red wine and a close groups of friends. Simple but delicious. I hope you enjoy it.

August 30
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Armand B.

2:50PM PDT on Aug 28, 2012

Thank you. We were counting on a huge harvest of 2 kinds of heirloom tomatoes this year. My wife started over 50 plants; we planted about half and gave the other half of the plants away. First the deer ate the tops off of most of our plants and just as they were coming back a blight started killing all the plants. I pulled them up and burned them...so zero tomatoes this year. The blight seems to have effected most everyone's tomatoes in this area this year.