I have a tomato problem. I didn’t think it would come to this, but it has. There are just too many tomatoes in my garden. Every day the children are bringing in buckets of them.

I thought that having six tomatoes plants would be manageable because I treated them so poorly. In fact they’re just lying all over the ground in a tangled mess.

But I guess one can mistreat tomato plants, and they’ll still produce.
This is a problem because I don’t “can.” I don’t know how to can, nor do I have any desire to can, but I do hate wasting good produce, so lately I’ve been making fresh salsa every day.

But that still didn’t get rid of all these tomatoes.
So I sallied forth and made my very first pot of homemade tomato soup. I did this by roasting a bunch of tomatoes, onions, and garlic first.

Then I blended them all in batches with basil from the garden.

My husband loved this soup, but the children thought it needed a little cream cheese. Me? I don’t care, I’m just trying to decide what I’m going to do with these:

In the meantime, what have I been listening to while chopping tomatoes? The Patrick Coffin Show. Have you heard his September interview with Joseph Pearce? It’s soooo entertaining! He and Pearce talk books for an hour and a half. It’s delightful, especially because they’re mentioning such great books like Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Belloc’s The Path To Rome.
Speaking of good books…if you’ve never read Joseph Pearce’s autobiography Race With the Devil, you should. I have a tremendous respect for that man. He went from being the leader of white supremacist group to writing Catholic biographies and editing a series of literature books for Ignatius Press.
Incidentally, my local Saturday Morning Book Club will be reading Pearce’s book Unmasking of Oscar Wilde in a few months. I can’t wait for it.
If you happen to have an immersion blender (which I didn’t have until about a year ago and I now love), you can saute a couple of sliced onions and some smashed garlic cloves (I like a lot), throw in a bunch of those tomatoes and olive oil, cook until the tomatoes are nice and soft, then blend the whole thing in the pot. Add salt, pepper, and whatever seasonings to taste. Cream? Why not. It’s a super easy pasta sauce that gets rid of a bunch of tomatoes. We, too, have the buckets of tomatoes problem. I do just throw a bunch in bags in the freezer as well when I am sick of dealing with them.
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Thank you for the ideas! Slowly I am learning!
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