When life gives you ugly tomatoes

It has probably transpired here in earlier posts that we have a special place in our hearts for tomatoes. Indeed, they could probably be called the national vegetable seeing as the traditional meal foreigners are typically told to try is the Shopska salad, featuring local tomatoes. Bulgarian expats coming home on holiday sing odes to the tomatoes. Odd but there it is.

In keeping with this significance of the tomato plant, there is hardly a self-respecting country household that doesn’t try to grow its own tomatoes. It is the ultimate summer salad product and the equally ultimate winter preserve product in the form of plain canned, pureed, or mixed with roasted red peppers and maybe an aubergine or two for that other traditional treat, the liutenitsa. In short, tomatoes are important.

As as reasonably self-respecting household, we, too, tried to grow our own tomatoes. In fact, we kind of outdid ourselves on tomatoes, as related here. We had a lot of tomato plants this year and they all took nicely. Then the June heat dropped and they started suffering. We still got a pretty decent crop, which confirmed the hypothesis that if you can’t trust any individual tomato plants to bear abundant fruit, you can hedge your bets by planting a lot of tomato plants.

So, we grew a lot of tomatoes this year. There was just one problem — they were small and, well, rather ugly. Then they also started getting dry on the stalk despite the regular watering, so about a week ago we called time on the first tomato harvest. And then we had to decide what to do with it because we couldn’t eat it all in salads. The tomatoes weren’t properly juicy and delicious.

Here, our sample looks rather decent. Add a reference point, however, and…

To the right is a normal-sized tomato from our neighbours’ garden. By normal-sized we mean the size of an average woman’s fist. That should put out ugly tomatlings in perspective. With or without perspective, we had to do something with them. So we decided to do a soup and stew additive, to use in winter.

The cherries really overperformed and all of the late ones went into the pot with the rest of what we grew.

A bit (quite a bit) of oregano, three homegrown onions, a tablespoon of salt, a teaspoon of sugar, and we were ready to roll or, as it happens, chop.

It looks rather unappetising, to be sure, but this was before we cooked it over medium heat until the colour changed. Once it did, the concoction was ready to go into the jars and seal itself as it cools. Because none of us can be bothered with sterilisation, we simply pour the hot jam/preserve/whatever into the jars, tighten the lids and place the jars upside down for a few minutes. This, Cris explains, creates vacuum inside, sealing the lid to the jar. It works, too.

A spoonful of this in the potato soup or the chicken stew would, hopefully, add a taste of home gardening to any meal. We’re waiting for colder weather to try it. But that’s the great thing about tomatoes — even when they’re small, ugly and not very tasty raw, you can always turn them into something quite delicious.

P.S. Our second tomato batch just started flowering.