You Say Tomato and I Say Tomato (Because We Have a Lot of Tomatoes)

After two weeks of not getting our farm share pickup we are back in the country and back in the kitchen to bring you another stimulating episode of The Race To Use Up Vegetables Before They Go Bad.

I got to the pickup around 4:30PM to discover that they weren't set up. As they were a bit behind I helped them unload the vegetables off the truck, muddying up my pants in the process. After everything was put into place I started filling my bags. At first I thought I was reading the quantities wrong but it said on each box what to get. It ended up being a tremendous amount of tomatoes: 3 large, 3 medium, 3 small, 3 plum, etc.



We ended up getting 1 eggplant, 1 bunch of carrots, a hundred tomatoes of various shapes and sizes, 2 peppers (1 purple, 1 reddish), 1 head of red leaf lettuce, 2 pounds of green beans, 5 ears of corn, 2 pounds of plums, 1 head of celery, and 1 bunch of parsley.



Whipping up a salad was pretty easy with those ingredients. I sliced up some of the celery which had a very strong scent to it and, like most of the vegetables we've been getting, had far more flavor to it than what we are used to. I cleaned up the lettuce and made a salad with some assorted tomatoes, celery, and grated carrot. I grated the carrots as finely as possible in hopes of flavoring the lettuce with some of the carrot juice. It turned out pretty well. And, as always, I used some lemon, olive oil, salt and pepper to finish it off.

I was awake at 4:00AM this morning courtesy of a tremendous bout of jet lag so I got the market just as it opened and bought some cod which looked fantastic. That was the only ingredient I knew for sure I'd have for tonight's dinner. Everything else came from the share.



I sliced some of the larger tomatoes and layered them on top of some of the portions of cod loin, drizzled with some olive oil, salt, pepper and parsley and baked at 450 degrees for about 20-25 minutes. It came out pretty tasty. I also took some of the onion, garlic and celery and threw it in the bottom of the roasting pan for flavor. The garlic and onion held up pretty nicely over the past two weeks.

I steamed up the corn then tossed with olive oil, butter, salt, pepper and parsley then did the same with the green beans (minus the parsley). Served with an all-purpose baked potato, it was a pretty nice last-minute meal.

Now that I know we're swimming in tomatoes I'll need to think of something to do with them later on this week. Suggestions are welcome.