By KAREN MADORIN
Late summer has arrived, depositing ripe tomatoes on my window ledge. Just as I rely on moon cycles and flipping calendar pages, I expect a moment during the last days of August and beginning of September when I wake up every morning to see red-orange fruits standing sentinel-like above our kitchen sink.
I’ve already canned or frozen the first heavy tomato harvest, adding onions, peppers, garlic, and seasonings to turn them into salsa that dresses potato and corn chips and well as salads and casseroles throughout the upcoming months. Once that initial picking and canning ends, our vines take a breather every summer, due, perhaps, to scorching heat that prevents them from pollinating.
No matter how diligently I water or mulch, triple digit temps force those vines to kick back and rest. I get it. I want to do the same when just walking out the door produces drenching sweat. Once evenings and early mornings turn cooler, little yellow blossoms once again morph into ballooning green fruits. However, it takes a while for the plants to catch up to earlier production mode. Once fruits start turning orange, I pick em and put em on the window sill to prevent birds and grasshoppers from nibbling them. This strategy results in a couple of tomatoes every day or two for a couple of weeks--not enough to freeze or can.
Who knows how, but I learned not to keep whole tomatoes in the fridge. As a result, these loners sunbathe in the window as they ripen and end up chopped into salads or sliced with bacon or ham on sandwiches. Eventually, more collect than we eat in a day, but not enough to freeze or can so there they sit, looking forlorn. Left to their own devices, they invite fruit flies to get to know one another so well that we soon have a swarm of progeny acting like our kitchen is Dulles Airport. Yikes.
That event requires either eating the tomatoes faster or constructing traps to control those miniscule flies high school biology classes study. It also begs the question. Are fresh tomatoes worth inviting fruit flies into the kitchen? Absolutely!
Once you conquer the fruit fly invasion, summer’s great pleasure involves fresh from the vine tomatoes. Devour the first standing in the garden with juices dribbling down your chin. After that, satisfaction requires a straight week of BLT sandwiches once, twice, or thrice a day. Once those sammies get boring, it’s time to slice those orbs thick to make tomato/mayo sandwiches for another feast or three. Follow that with a week-long barrage of thick tomato slices topped with fresh mozzarella and broiled til golden cheese drizzles over the edges. As harvest escalates, add chopped tomatoes to creamy cottage cheese or stuff hollowed-out tomatoes with cottage cheese or tuna salad to add variety. The possibilities are limitless.
Enough time has passed that that line of tomatoes on the window sill will soon overflow the space. In short time, fruits ripening two at time will shift to harvest overload. Fire up the canner or make room in the freezer!