Too Much of a Good Thing

A new job, too many tomatoes, and finding my way back into the kitchen

In case anyone has wondered where I’ve run off to, I got a part-time job at Walmart at the end of June. It’s the first job I’ve had since my stem cell transplant. And in hindsight, starting a new job just as the garden was heading into peak summer production was impeccable timing.

I knew going back to work would be an adjustment, but one thing I hadn’t fully appreciated was how much more of your life a part-time job takes up than just the hours you’re actually on the clock. There’s getting ready, the half-hour drive each way, learning a completely new job, and then coming home physically and mentally tired. And of course, everything that was already part of my life was still waiting for me when I got home: the animals, the house, the garden, and all the ordinary things that need to be done whether I’ve been at work that day or not.

Cooking was one of the first things to fall by the wayside. For most of the last seven weeks, I really haven’t cooked very much at all. I would look at the tomatoes piling up and think, I really need to roast those tomorrow, or tell myself I was going to do something with the eggplant or peppers, and then another day would go by.

I wasn’t short on ideas. I was short on energy.

Meanwhile, the onslaught from the garden had started with zucchini and cucumbers coming out of my ears. Then the tomatoes joined in, followed by the eggplant and peppers.

And this is what I mean by cucumbers coming out of my ears.

And because life rarely seems to introduce changes one at a time, a couple of weeks into my new job I came down with a summer cold. Just as that was winding down, I injured my wrist. Somewhere in the middle of all that, eighteen ducklings hatched, my basement temporarily became a chicken infirmary, and Lucia, my horse, decided it would be a good time to come up lame again.

Thankfully, I haven’t been handling all of this by myself. I should give Pino some credit here. Since I went back to work, he’s taken on more of the outdoor and animal chores, especially while I was sick and dealing with my wrist. That extra help has made a big difference.

Even with his help, this little experiment in returning to work has given me a new appreciation for people who carry much heavier loads than I do. I think about all the people, especially parents, who work a full day because their families need the income and then come home to children, dinner, laundry, homework, housework, and everything else waiting for them.

I don’t have children at home, and I have a husband who shares the work with me, so I’m under no illusion that my situation is the same. But adding even a part-time job to an already full life has given me a much better appreciation for just how much some people manage day after day.

The Garden Wasn’t Waiting

The garden, meanwhile, remained completely unsympathetic to my scheduling difficulties.

I did my best to give away the surplus, and plenty of it found willing homes. I handed out zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, whatever I had too much of at the moment.

But after a while, I started hearing things like, “Oh, I still have some of those cucumbers you gave me last week,” or, “I still have zucchini.”

And I have to admit, my first thought was sometimes, How do you still have that? There are so many things you can do with it!

Except they didn’t necessarily know all the things you could do with it. Because I cook a lot, I’m used to looking at a pile of summer produce and seeing possibilities: something to roast, sauté, fold into an omelet or frittata, turn into a salad, make into a sauce, or freeze for later. But someone who doesn’t cook as often, or who has simply been handed a bag of vegetables they weren’t planning on buying, may just see six cucumbers and three zucchini sitting on the counter, quietly becoming their responsibility.

And maybe that’s who some of these next posts are really for.

You don’t need to have a huge garden. Maybe you have two tomato plants that suddenly decided to produce everything at once. Maybe your neighbor keeps handing you zucchini. Maybe somebody at work gave you a bag of tomatoes and peppers. Or maybe you do have a small garden, but you have no interest whatsoever in spending August standing over a canner.

What I want to share are some ways to use summer produce that don’t require specialized preserving equipment and, most importantly, taste really good.

Back in the Kitchen

Seven weeks in, I’m finally starting to feel like I’m figuring out how to fit this new job into the life I already had. My wrist is improving, thankfully, which has taken away some of the worry I had about whether working was just going to keep aggravating it. I’m not nearly as exhausted by every shift as I was in the beginning, either. Little by little, this new routine is starting to feel more like part of my life instead of something that has temporarily taken it over.

And I’m finally getting back into the kitchen.

Not everything waited patiently for me to catch up. Some vegetables spoiled before I could get to them. Some went to the compost pile, some went to the chickens, and quite a lot went home with friends and neighbors.

But lately I’ve started actually doing some of the things I kept telling myself I was going to do: roasting tomatoes, cooking the eggplant, using the peppers, and figuring out how to turn all this summer abundance into food we’ll actually eat.

I’ve also noticed one slightly ridiculous side effect of having too much good food around: I’m forever trying to rescue whatever is oldest first. I’ll stand at the counter trimming a soft spot off a tomato that really needs to be eaten today while perfectly beautiful, blemish-free tomatoes sit nearby getting older by the minute.

I’ve somehow managed to do the same thing with eggs. I sell the nicest, freshest eggs and keep the leftovers for us. They’re either eggs that aren’t quite pretty enough to sell or eggs that have been around long enough that I’d rather keep them for us than sell them to someone else. Then they pile up in the refrigerator. I actually mark the cartons USE FIRST, USE SECOND, USE THIRD, and USE FOURTH so we can work through them in order.

You’d think raising chickens would mean we always eat fresh eggs. You’d be wrong.

The problem is that we only finally used the USE FIRST carton last night, and we still have about three dozen “newer” eggs waiting behind it. We have fresh eggs being laid in our own yard every day, and I have somehow established an internal FIFO inventory system that ensures we eat the oldest merchandise. At that point, we might as well buy grocery store eggs. At this rate, we may not eat one of our own truly fresh eggs until winter.

Of course I don’t want to waste food, and there’s nothing wrong with using what needs to be used. But I also don’t have to earn the right to eat the beautiful fresh tomato by first consuming every declining tomato in chronological order.

Avoiding waste is worthwhile, but not if I never let myself enjoy the things we worked so hard to produce at their absolute best. Part of the reason we grow all this food, and raise all these chickens, in the first place is to enjoy it when it’s fresh.

Sometimes you just need to make something really good with some of it now and save the rest for later.

Eat Some Now

One thing I’ve realized, too, is that not every tomato needs the same destiny.

The really beautiful ones, the big Brandywines or Black Krims, usually get the caprese treatment around here. Several nights a week in tomato season, we’ll cut them into thick slices, sprinkle the tomatoes themselves with salt, top them with slices of fresh mozzarella, pile on a generous handful of basil chiffonade, drizzle everything with good olive oil and balsamic glaze, and finish with a grind of black pepper.

Brandywine or Black Krim tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, lots of basil, good olive oil and balsamic glaze. I could eat this all summer.

Then it all goes onto a piece of sourdough toast.

Every time we have it, I end up telling Pino I think I could eat it every night.

But not every tomato is destined for caprese, and that’s where another favorite comes in.

Today, while I was cutting tomatoes into halves and large pieces to roast, I ended up with a bowlful of beautiful wedges and chunks that were simply too small for what I was doing with the roasting pan. They weren’t scraps by any means. They were perfectly good tomatoes, and there were a lot of them.

I also happened to have one beautiful cucumber left in the refrigerator, and that immediately suggested one of our favorite summer salads.

One of our favorite ways to make tomatoes and cucumbers taste completely different.

We eat some version of a tomato-cucumber-feta salad often during the summer. We love Greek and Mediterranean flavors, and one of the things I’ve learned about eating a lot of the same garden vegetables is that you don’t necessarily get tired of the vegetables. You get tired of eating them the same way.

So I combined the tomatoes and cucumber with plenty of feta, fresh parsley from the garden, oregano, pickled red onion, a little pickled jalapeño (I know—not very Mediterranean), good olive oil, red wine vinegar, and fresh lemon juice, then seasoned it with salt and pepper.

There really isn’t much of a recipe. I use whatever amounts I happen to have, taste it, and adjust until it makes me happy.

The result is bright and briny and herby, with the creamy feta, the tartness of the vinegar and lemon, and just a little kick from the jalapeño. It doesn’t feel anything like simply adding another cucumber or tomato to an ordinary salad.

That was part of our dinner tonight, and it was absolutely delicious.

In a season when I’m trying to keep up with both work and the garden, that kind of simple, use-what-you-have food feels like a small victory.

Save Some for Later

And then there are the tomatoes I simply want to save.

For this, San Marzanos are almost perfect. They’re a plum tomato, so I can just cut them in half and arrange them skin-side down on a parchment-lined sheet pan. I drizzle them with olive oil and season them with salt, freshly ground black pepper, and thyme.

Prepping San Marzanos for roasting, with plenty more still waiting their turn.

If I have fresh thyme handy, I like to scatter a few sprigs over the pan. If I don’t feel like walking outside to cut it, which was the case today, dried thyme works just fine.

This is also a good time to add some garlic to the pan. I harvested a lot of garlic earlier this summer, and quite a bit of it is still waiting for me to deal with, so I’m happy for any excuse to use it. I’ll tuck in a few whole cloves or even a halved head of garlic and let it roast along with the tomatoes. The garlic gets soft and sweet and is just as useful later as the tomatoes themselves.

Any plum tomato should work beautifully this way, and cherry tomatoes are wonderful roasted whole. They’ll cook much faster, so keep an eye on them.

Larger slicing tomatoes work too. With those, I cut large fleshy sections from around the outside of the tomato, keeping the skin attached to each piece so I can lay them skin-side down. The remaining wedges and chunks can go into something else. That’s exactly how tonight’s tomato-cucumber-feta salad happened.

Roasted tomatoes with garlic and thyme, concentrated and caramelized and ready to cool for the freezer.

At 425°F, my halved San Marzanos usually take somewhere around 40 to 50 minutes. I’m looking for them to soften, concentrate, and start to caramelize around the edges, with much of their excess moisture cooked away. Depending on the tomatoes and how crowded the pan is, the timing can vary, so I start checking them before they’re done.

And that’s really it.

Once they’re completely cool, I portion them into freezer bags or containers and freeze them. Then they can wait for a day when I have more time or more inspiration.

Later they’re wonderful in a pasta salad, or tossed into a simple hot pasta dish with olive oil, cheese, and fresh herbs. They can go into an omelet or a frittata, or pile onto crostini with something creamy like burrata or fresh mozzarella, and a little basil. I like to use them in dishes where that deep, concentrated, intensely roasted-tomato flavor can really shine.

That may be my favorite thing about this method: I don’t have to decide today what all those tomatoes are eventually going to become.

I only have to keep them from becoming compost.

What's Coming: More Ways to Use Summer Produce

All of this has me thinking I may finally have found my way into writing more about food here.

Over the next few weeks, I want to share some of the other things I’ve been making with this late-summer abundance.

One is caponata, a Sicilian eggplant dish that turned out so well that it really deserves a post of its own. I’ve also been experimenting with a roasted tomato soup base for the freezer, which I’m hoping will make an easy soup later when fresh tomatoes are only a memory.

And then there’s my roasted tomato-poblano-jalapeño mixture, which has quickly become one of our favorites.

Tonight we tucked some into low-carb tortillas with rotisserie chicken and cheese, then added a little sour cream, and it was ridiculously good. We’ve also used it in omelets, where it makes an almost instant filling with cheese, avocado, or whatever else sounds good.

That one may be especially useful if you happen to be dealing with an abundance of both garden vegetables and eggs, which, around here, is a very real possibility.

So I think that’s what you’ll be seeing a little more of here for a while: delicious ways to use what summer gives you. Some are very simple, some a little more involved, and all are considerably easier if you resist my tendency to make three of them in one afternoon.

What Works for Now

I don’t think I’ve figured out how to “balance” all of this yet, and I’m not sure balance is even the right word. What I’m learning is how to adapt.

Adding something new to an already full life doesn’t mean everything else politely stays in place while you make room for it. Some things have to shift. Some things have to wait. And occasionally some perfectly good vegetables end up feeding the chickens.

Right now, part of adapting means making better use of what’s already in front of me: eating the perfect tomatoes while they’re perfect, roasting some for later, and finding delicious ways to use whatever the garden happens to be producing in ridiculous quantities.

I’m certainly not caught up. There are still several plates of tomatoes on my kitchen table.

But I’m cooking again, and for now, that feels like progress.