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I finally bought a dunk pot today -- the kind with holes that fits in another pot, so that you can immerse and retrieve stuff you want to dunk in boiling water. Much better than fishing things out with a spider.
Anyway, $20 to Cash&Carry (and a lot of windowshopping) later, I brought it home and started dunking tomatoes in hot water.
Much is said in various publications about blanching tomatoes to make them easy to peel. Half the time I don't bother -- I just sit down with a paring knife and a movie and do it the usual way. I had a lot of small ones this time, though, so I figured hot water was the way to go.
As I say, lots of people have talked about how to do it. ( Here are my own notes: )
I spent all afternoon and a good portion of the evening peeling and coring tomatoes. After all that, the tomatoes look fabulous. Whatever else might be said about Neves Azorean Red (I think the taste when fresh isn't much, but its other attributes are great) it has a blazing red color. I've also got eight pints of yellow and orange tomatoes, about the color of carrot juice, plus two pints of that juice to do weird things with.
I wasn't able to reach my mom tonight -- she'll be back in town tomorrow, but I had hoped to get our family recipe for ratatouille so that I could do a batch alongside the tomatoes -- but I threw the remaining tomatoes and the uncut veggies back into the fridge, to be dealt with in the next couple of days. It won't kill me to assemble the canning supplies again.
The bomb is depressurizing in the kitchen, and when I open it up, I'll have fourteen pints of chopped tomatoes, some in day-glo orange. Things are looking pretty good.
Oh, and Cash&Carry has a "Cheese/Jam dish" for $10 that would make a great salt cellar. I'll see whether I can get it as a household thing. It would sure beat having the sugar and salt containers look almost exactly the same...
Anyway, $20 to Cash&Carry (and a lot of windowshopping) later, I brought it home and started dunking tomatoes in hot water.
Much is said in various publications about blanching tomatoes to make them easy to peel. Half the time I don't bother -- I just sit down with a paring knife and a movie and do it the usual way. I had a lot of small ones this time, though, so I figured hot water was the way to go.
As I say, lots of people have talked about how to do it. ( Here are my own notes: )
I spent all afternoon and a good portion of the evening peeling and coring tomatoes. After all that, the tomatoes look fabulous. Whatever else might be said about Neves Azorean Red (I think the taste when fresh isn't much, but its other attributes are great) it has a blazing red color. I've also got eight pints of yellow and orange tomatoes, about the color of carrot juice, plus two pints of that juice to do weird things with.
I wasn't able to reach my mom tonight -- she'll be back in town tomorrow, but I had hoped to get our family recipe for ratatouille so that I could do a batch alongside the tomatoes -- but I threw the remaining tomatoes and the uncut veggies back into the fridge, to be dealt with in the next couple of days. It won't kill me to assemble the canning supplies again.
The bomb is depressurizing in the kitchen, and when I open it up, I'll have fourteen pints of chopped tomatoes, some in day-glo orange. Things are looking pretty good.
Oh, and Cash&Carry has a "Cheese/Jam dish" for $10 that would make a great salt cellar. I'll see whether I can get it as a household thing. It would sure beat having the sugar and salt containers look almost exactly the same...
