My dad grew up in the Depression years, so if anything could be conserved and/or reused, our family did it. Wasting food wasn’t quite a cardinal sin, but we mourned the occasional demise of a leftover with the regret most people would feel over losing a $5 bill.
I inherited the food-conservation compulsion.
So. You may recall that Hubby and I grew a gigantic and successful veggie garden this year. The tomatoes were particularly prolific. We ate fresh tomatoes with almost every meal, and I canned quarts and quarts of them. Then I made salsa, ketchup, tomato paste, and green tomato pickle. I gave away tomatoes to friends, neighbours, and the food bank; and the tomatoes just kept coming.
We still have so many tomatoes that for once in my life, I’ve stopped worrying about wasting them. (Okay, not really; but at least I’m slightly less obsessive about it.) So I’m trying something new: Tomato wine and tomato cider.
It may not be as weird as it sounds; or at least we’re not the first to attempt it. I have no idea whether it will be tasty, barely drinkable, or vile rocket fuel; but at this point I have nothing to lose but a couple of pounds of sugar and a package of yeast.
Wine-making vocabulary always makes me wonder whether I’m fermenting a beverage or describing some kind of medieval torture: Pitching the yeast, racking off… it all sounds painful and barbaric. But drinking our tomato hooch might actually turn out to be akin to medieval torture; so maybe the vocabulary is more appropriate than I realize.
Even if it fails, it’s an interesting experiment; and at least I tried to Not Waste Food. I think my dad would be pleased: His chokecherry wine was legendary. (Keeping in mind that ‘legendary’ can be astoundingly good or abysmally bad. It was definitely memorable.)
Anybody else ever made tomato wine or cider? Or have more ideas for using another twenty pounds of tomatoes? Maybe tomato ice cream…?
Book 15 update: Another good writing week! I’m in the middle of Chapter 9 with flashing lights and sirens, and Arnie’s found another feline friend.
We don’t end up with as many tomatoes as you seem to, but quite often we will freeze a tray of them. then, when they defrost they are perfect for making an amazing spag bol or chilli, you don’t even need to cut them up first like when they’re ripe, just chuck them in!
We also put them out the front with the masses of rhubarb we end up with for people to help themselves to
LikeLike
That’s a great idea! Lots of people do that here, too; for free or for sale. There are little “honour stands” all over: A table with some fruit or veggies, and a tin for money. People stop by, help themselves, and leave payment. It really restores my faith in humanity! 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pingback: Going Bananas | Author Diane Henders
Someone did try tomato ice cream. Never tasted it. Now, I’m getting a bit curious as well.
LikeLike
I had tomato sorbet once, and it was surprisingly tasty (and it didn’t really taste like tomatoes). I’m looking forward to the initial tasting of the wine!
LikeLike
Tomato wine….now that’s a new one. I love tomatoes and am still trying to wrap my mind around them as the basis for a wine. I guess I need to refill my glass of Cabernet and ruminate on that for awhile…:)
LikeLike
An excellent plan! 🙂 The more I drink, the better tomato wine sounds.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pingback: Gardening and Other Extreme Sports | Author Diane Henders
Diane I grew up in a similar family where food waste was not tolerated. They were ahead of the game for now it has become such a worldwide issue..
I’ve not heard of tomato wine or of it being used as rocket fuel. Perhaps you are on to something. If i see a red streak in the sky I’ll be thinking of you.
LikeLike
And if you hear a loud shriek all the way to Calgary, you’ll know we tasted it and found it, um… sub-optimal.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Haha I’ll be listening.
LikeLiked by 1 person
But only to those who share it.
Poop jokes aren’t my favorite kind of jokes, but they’re a solid number two.
LikeLike
BAHAHAHA!!!
LikeLike
My immaturity blocked out everything but “racking off” and “chokecherry” . With “yeasty ooze” still rattling in the back of my brain, it’s time for me to quit sniggering like Beavis, and think about something else.
Or not..😎
LikeLike
LOL! But why? Immaturity is so entertaining. 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
What will you call it? Carboardeax and Pinot More are there to go one up on.
LikeLike
Ha! Good ones! I’m not sure this vintage will rate naming — I might prefer to let it slide into obscurity after tasting it. Time will tell…
LikeLike
How about making Tomato jam?
LikeLike
Oooooh, I never even thought of that! I bet it would be yummy. Hmmm, I’ve still got several pounds of ripe tomatoes…
LikeLike
Like you, I never waste food. I hate any kind of waste in general. We sometimes see communal gardens and the fruit and veggies (among which many tomatoes) are just lying on the ground, going to waste. How we wished we could jump the fence and put those veggies to good use!
How about tomato juice? And, freezing some of it? You probably did that already. I like the Bloody Mary idea of a previous commenter. And, I’m curious to find out how this experiment goes. Splattered tomatoes might be harder to clean off the ceiling than splattered sourdough starter! 🙂
LikeLike
That’s true! We already had an ‘oops’ — we were racking off and there was a lot of pulp still in the mix. Our siphon had a major hiccup, and then I got to clean yeasty semi-booze off the floor, wall, and counter. But as long as it doesn’t hit the ceiling, I consider it only a minor setback. 😉
So sad to see veggies rotting in a communal garden! Around here there are gleaning groups — if you don’t want or can’t use all of your garden’s veggies or fruit, you can phone these groups and they will come and collect the goodies and donate them to the food bank (or compost them if they’re too far gone). I love living on Vancouver Island!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Big fan of Chardonnays myself. Red wines usually give me a headache. I really like a lot of the German and Australian wines. Guess I will now have to start a wine cellar (well, maybe a closet).
LikeLike
We have a wine rack, but it’s usually empty. There seems to be a certain amount of, erm… attrition. Due to rigorous testing, of course.
LikeLike
Aha! Instant Bloody Mary!! Nailed it!!
Then again, if the result of that experiment proves to be, er, suboptimal, remember that, uh, excess organic material can easily be incorporated back into the soil as, er, enrichment. There. Improving the nutritional profile of your gardening environment. Totally worthwhile, laudable even, and an obviously righteous methodology for, uh, disposing of the evidence. And all without wasting any food at all.
You’re welcome. 😁
LikeLike
Thank you! I bow before your superior rationalization skills. And not only am I feeding the soil; I’m also supplying much-needed nutrition to zillions of little yeast organisms that would have gone hungry otherwise. When you look at it that way, it’s practically my responsibility to brew a bunch of booze. And taste it rigorously, too. Y’know, for quality control.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah. For…uh, science. Yeah!! That’s it!! SCIENCE!! And pushing the envelope! And going where no one’s gone before and lived to tell the tale!! Oh, wait…
LikeLike
Ethanol, methanol; potato, potahto. It’s all in good fun until somebody goes blind…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Or the cops show up. Uh, so I’ve heard… You know, from unreliable sources, and all. Pure hearsay, of course.
LikeLike
Uh-huh. I wouldn’t know. *assumes an expression of wide-eyed innocence*
LikeLiked by 1 person
Mm-hmm. I understand. Completely. (Seriously. Why wouldn’t I?)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Th e story about your Dad’s wine brings to mind my own father’s “Beaujo-barb” wine. 🙂
LikeLike
LOL! “Beaujo-barb” — even the name makes me shiver. We attempted various wine recipes with rhubarb and never did achieve anything palatable. But trying to create something alcoholic doesn’t technically count as “wasting food”… 😉
LikeLike
If it has alcohol in it then it is drinkable. By someone somewhere. Our growing season is barely long enough to grow tomatoes and some years it isn’t so we have to ripen them indoors after picking. Maybe someday I will live in a more temperate climate.
LikeLike
Everyone told us we wouldn’t be able to grow tomatoes here — too cool and wet. But we’re inland by 10 miles or so; and the last couple of summers have been unseasonably hot. I don’t know if our good luck with tomatoes will continue; but I always used to ripen them indoors when we lived in Calgary, too. One way or another, I WILL grow tomatoes!
And that’s an excellent point about the alcohol content. The trick is to give the guests some high-quality booze first. By the time we bring out our hooch, they won’t be able to tell the difference. 😉
LikeLike
I’m the same way about not wasting food. I would put a bunch of tomatoes in a blender and add salt and pepper.
LikeLike
That would be yummy! I love a nice big slab of tomato on fresh bread slathered with mayo and salt and pepper, too.
LikeLiked by 1 person
And with the addition of BACON to your heavenly creation, it becomes the highly-revered BLT!! Or BT, rather. Lettuce? Meh. Unless it’s Romaine, of course. But I digress. Bacon, tomato, and mayo. And some yeasty, fresh, homemade bread. Entire civilizations have peaked and faded away while boasting of lesser creations.
On a related subject, I know what I’ll have for supper. 🙂
LikeLike
Okay, now my stomach is growling… and we’re OUT OF BACON!!! Implementing emergency bacon-preparedness measures now…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sun dried tomatoes… always worth a try How hard can that be? The only problem ,after laying the tomato slices on a cookie sheet in the sun, would be keep the chipmunks from stealing them. …but then again drying in the oven might be a better choice.
LikeLike
Mmm, I love sun-dried tomatoes! The sun is pretty well gone for the winter here, though — we’re into our rainy winter weather now. The oven is definitely a better option! (Plus it makes the house nice and toasty-warm.) 🙂
LikeLike
Our families were obviously familiar. When crops were particularly prolific visitors to our home were not allowed to leave without a bucket of whatever the crop du jour was.
Home grown tomatoes? Complete bliss. I happily eat them straight from tne vine. And make chutneys, sauces, relishes. Sadly we haven’t had a bumper crop in years. (Too dry and too hot).
Tomato wine/cider? Worth a try. You know we will be interested in the results too. Review required in the fullness of time. And depending on the alcohol content fullness might be an entirely accurate description.
LikeLike
Yes indeed! The enthusiasm of the review will be dependent on how much I’ve imbibed. 😉
I love tomatoes, too — like you, I eat them straight from the vine. And I completely pig out on them in the summer because I refuse to buy grocery-store tomatoes during the winter. Those pale, mealy, tasteless things aren’t even worth the trouble of chewing. The garden is a lot of work, but it’s so worth it!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Is that green tomato pickle by chance also known as chow? (or in some circles, chow chow?) That’s the only tomatoey thing I can still eat. I was also going to suggest soup although I see you prefer canned. But just plain hot stewed tomatoes, with salt and pepper, which is how my mother made it when I was little, is surprisingly good, and so different from canned cream of tomato soup that it’s a whole different thing. Then there’s tomatoes cut in half, sprinkled with parmesan and stuck under a broiler for a minute or two, as a side dish. Or, like we had in university, grilled open face sandwiches of cheese-bacon-tomato. A cooked tomato is so unlike a raw tomato that it opens up new vistas of taste. And what about dried tomatoes? You can even invest in a new appliance just for that purpose! Just what you wanted, no doubt 🙂
But all those things won’t solve your tomato glut, will they? Tomato wine just might! I hope it turns out wonderfully and you get to enjoy it all winter long 🙂
LikeLike
Thank you! I love plain stewed tomatoes, too, and these ones are so sweet it’s almost like eating dessert. I’m still eating Greek salad and Caprese salad, too — I never get tired of them! And maybe I’ll try a version of cream of tomato soup – who knows; it might become our new favourite. 🙂
I’ve heard green tomato pickle referred to as both ‘chow’ and ‘chow-chow’, but those recipes seem to have a bit more to them than our family’s version. Ours is just green tomatoes, onions, salt, and a bit of turmeric and mustard seed, cooked in vinegar. It’s mouthwateringly sour and tangy! And how interesting that you can eat chow but not ripe tomato recipes. I’ll never understand why our bodies seem to arbitrarily choose one thing and reject another!
LikeLike
I think the difference is due to the quantity – if I could eat tomatoes, I’d eat at least one regular size one per meal. But I’d only eat a tablespoon or so of chow and only once in a long while, and it would be mixed in with all the plain stuff I eat, like mashed potatoes 😀
LikeLike
Makes sense — chow isn’t one of those things you chow down on. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) 😉
LikeLike
I can make tomato soup from a can, but to do that with real tomatoes is way beyond my cooking skills.
LikeLike
Our problem with tomato soup is that we like the flavour of the canned variety; and since it bears only a passing resemblance to anything in the natural world, it’s very hard to recreate that artificial flavour. Sad but true…
LikeLiked by 1 person
If I were closer, I would gladly have paid to get some decent tomatoes! Salsa would be high on my list (growing the jalapeños and other peppers myself as well), and I have in the past canned tomato pureé since I use it in quite a few concoctions here. I was perfectly happy with a large tomato and salad dressing for lunch.
I’m not sure about the tomato wine (that’s…interesting? 😁), but my dad was on a kick of making champagne for several years. From grapes, not tomatoes. Every autumn it was the same procedure–he would get the grapes going in the crock, and the basement would always be host to a handful of fruit flies…and that smell! Thankfully once all that mashed stuff was gone and it was down to a liquid, and put in the 5 gallon bottles where it would percolate for months, the basement would return somewhat to normal.
One amusing anecdote (other than the time my nine year old self “sampled” some of the champagne as he was bottling it, and ended up sitting my bedroom quite plastered afterwards) was the night I’d just gone to bed, and hear some loud bangs, sounding and feeling like they were hitting the bottom of the floor in my bedroom. He had bottled some champagne that night, but since it was running late, he decided he would wire the corks onto the bottles the next day. The champagne had other plans and turned the plastic corks into projectiles. So he was up late that night, dodging the popping corks and wiring up the remaining bottles before they popped.
He grew tired of that particular hobby, and eventually the last batch just sat underneath the bar, percolating away for years. When we cleared out the house about 15 years ago, I ended up dumping several 5-gallon jugs of what probably was vinegar into the sewer system; I’m sure the fishies and other aquatic creatures out in Lake St. Clair didn’t appreciate that, or perhaps they liked vinegar for their seaweed salads. I counted at least ten five gallon bottles (these were formerly water bottles), and twelve cases of used champagne bottles that we eventually gave away.
Dad was one of those Depression-era children as well, and aside from his other cheapskate habits, he never let food go to waste. Even the undesirable leftovers would be consumed. And unfortunately I inherited some of that myself. It bothers me to toss away edible food, even if I can’t stomach eating it myself.
LikeLike
I’m chuckling, because there are many times I’ve forced down truly awful-tasting concoctions that anybody in their right mind would have thrown away. They were failed recipes that were completely safe to eat; they just had revolting flavours or textures. But down the hatch they went!
Your dad’s champagne experience rang a very familiar bell. It never happened to my dad; but Hubby’s dad used to make wine, too, and once he made the mistake of bottling before the yeast was completely inactive. He had stored the wine in glass gallon jugs, and when the first one exploded it set off a chain reaction in all the other highly-stressed vessels. Hubby said they went off one after another, ping-ping-ping-ping! I guess that’s a mistake he only made once. 😉
And yes, we grew all our own hot and sweet peppers this year, too. Hubby’s got a 5-gallon pail of jalapenos out in the garage right now. We’ve already pickled and frozen all we need, so these ones might end up getting dried on a string. At least they’re ornamental, with all their lovely bright reds and greens!
LikeLike
Diane, creative, thinking people like you and Steve Jobs are always looking for the “next big thing.” Maybe you have just discovered it!
LikeLike
Maybe… or maybe I’m just one of those eccentric “inventors” who jump from one crazy scheme to the next. But at least I’ll have an alcoholic beverage to stimulate my creativity. 😉
LikeLike