Cooking with Tomatoes

It seems like a lot of recipes we use call for canned tomatoes. You can even find canned tomatoes among the few items they sell in bulk at Costco because they're used so often. And anytime I've tried to find an alternate recipe for something like marinara sauce or tomato soup that used fresh tomatoes, I've had a very difficult time. This is unfortunate. A friend recently pointed out an article in Prevention Magazine that said tomatoes are the worst thing you could eat from a can. Remember BPA, the chemical that freaked parents out when it was found in baby bottles? Well, BPA is also in the lining of aluminum cans as a way to prevent the aluminum from leaching into our food. So we get BPA instead. The problem with tomatoes specifically is that their high acidity causes the BPA to really leach into them and contaminate the food we eat.

Last summer I tried my hand at a vegetable garden. Most of my veggies failed, but my tomato plant was ruthless. I harvested tons of tomatoes and hardly did anything to get it to grow. It was the easiest thing in the world. I understand that even if you don't have the room for a vegetable garden, you can grow tomatoes hanging upside down from one of those hanging mesh plant holders. Just make sure you start from seed. I wished I'd had a good way to "can" (or freeze) all those tomatoes for use during the winter when my family was craving all those tomato-y comfort foods.

A few weeks ago I did find a recipe for marinara made with real tomatoes. The problem was that it had me peeling and de-seeding the 5 pounds of tomatoes I'd bought. I quickly grew frustrated and thought there had to be a better way! Well, there is! I'm going to show you my substitute for diced tomatoes. It is a little more involved than opening a can. But I probably spent 10-15 minutes actually working on the tomatoes. And this is definitely do-ahead friendly. Do this when you have a whole bunch of tomatoes and then freeze in batches. It's so worth the effort. Your food will be so much more flavorful. I prepared the tomatoes on Friday for a dish I made the following Monday.

Here are my beautiful tomatoes. Aren't they gorgeous? Make sure you get really good tomatoes for this. They taste so much better and since you're going to the trouble, do it right. Go to the farmer's market. The cherry tomatoes came in my produce box so I wanted to use them for this. I won't use cherry tomatoes next time, though, because once you get rid of the peel and the seeds there isn't much left. The bigger ones worked wonderfully.
First you want to blanch them. What is blanching? Oh my goodness, it's so easy. Just boil a big ol' pot of water. Once it's boiling, I mean really boiling, stick the tomatoes in. You only want to leave them in for a minute or two to get the skin loose. We don't want the tomatoes getting too mushy. Here, see how the skin is just beckoning you to pick it off?So that's exactly what you'll do next. Leave them to cool a bit (or if you're in a hurry run them under cold water) and then gently peel the skin off. It should come off very easily. Then, with a very sharp knife, cut them in half horizontally. (Yup - bolded for importance.) Then you should be able to gently squeeze the seeds and accompanying goop out all at once. Voila! Cake, I tell you. Cake.
Once you've gotten rid of all the peel and seeds you can loosely dice them. You'll want to measure them and freeze them in batches of about 2 cups since cans of tomatoes typically come in a 14.5 oz size (just under 2 cups). My 3-ish pounds of tomatoes yielded about 3 cups, but if you use all regular-sized tomatoes you'll probably get more than that.I used all of mine in doubling my recipe for stuffed bell peppers. I'll be sharing this with you later on this week.