Oh geeze. Are these 3 tomato plants the only ones that you're growing this year? If so, I suppose donating the produce to your local soup kitchen might or food bank be a nice gesture.

If you've got more varieties in your garden, you could always freeze some of the sausage types with some of the other varieties and use that for sauce.

We usually end up freezing quite a bit of fruit by the end of the season to use over the winter. In each freezer bag there's usually a mixture of red, green, yellow and black tomatoes which make for some interestingly flavored sauce.

Hi,

I know some people on this forum don't like to purchaes from "box stores"...but I was there yesterday (Home Depot) - DH is doing some home improvement stuff and I snuck over to the Garden Center. I picked up an Jalapeno plant(I planted every other hot pepper in the universe and managed to forget this one!!) and noticed a TON of tomato plants still around. They were of a good size, and although you may get your tomatatoes a bit later, I think they'd do okay with proper love and attention. I have to say the pots were 6" in diameter or bigger and they had to be about 2'high or taller. They were in those peat pots, so all you'd have to do is slit the sides and plant. They were not leggy and I think I saw one with a tomato on it. I cannot remember the brand of tomato (because I was looking for jalapenos and not tomatoes!), but these were not paste tomatoes - they were "normal" tomatoes (for a lack of better terminology.

If you are desperate, I would take a look at your local Home Depot or Lowes.

I'd love to have your paste tomatoes...we did not plant any!

Good luck!

Pam
Havertown, PA

We do most of our tomato canning with paste tomatoes and while they are not as good to eat fresh, they are great as juice, so you could cook them up run them thru a ricer, add a tsp salt per quart and drink - can store in fridge if don't want to process them.

Thanks everyone, I appreciate your input. Never knew that you could juice a paste tomato, sounds like a splendid idea. I really don't know much about canning or preserving so maybe I'll look into it a little more. Can't hurt to try them, maybe I will like them more than Roma types. If not I will give them away to someone who can use them....Lisa

You could make your own salsa and freeze it, they are great to grill and try stuffing them. Stove top stuffing and hollow them out and fill, bake with a little cheese on top sounds good to me.

Make a big pot of soup. Dice the tomatoes, add some onion and chopped zucchini, corn or whatever vegetables you have kicking around. Add some rice and herbs...basil, parsley, marjoram, thyme...

Freeze the extra if you have a lot.

Zeuspaul

I agree with the salsa idea. Not that I disagree with any of the other suggestions, just that I like salsa :)

Using a 'regular' tomato the salsa is invariably 'juicy'. Not a bad thing, but the lower amount of water in the paste tomatos results in a salsa where the tomatos are easy to slice and dice and retain their shape and not flood the salsa with liquid. Very good in my opinion. It is more of a chunky type salsa.

Lisa-Regina, Wow, twelve bucks for three plants? Holy macaroni!!! One thing you can do with the Romas is cut them in half, dig out the seeds with your index finger, place on a rimmed cookie sheet and dry in a 200 degree oven for six hours. Dried tomatoes are real easy to store and useful for soups and sauces. I use dried tomatoes when I make pasta putanesca.

Grandpop and zeus, I sure like both your ideas. I just made a big pot of soup yesterday with all kinds of veggies and herbs from my garden + pasta and canned canneloni beans. Yum! Grandpop, my daughter gave me a juicer for Christmas so that's what I do with my extra tomatoes. Aren't we lucky to have fresh juice?

Along the line of Zeuspaul's suggestion, we sometimes take extra tomatoes and blanch them (drop in boiling water for 2 minutes and then into ice water), then we freeze them. First we freeze them on a cookie tray, then we drop them, whole, into a ziplock bag and keep them frozen. During the winter it is simply MARVELOUS to use these frozen tomatoes in a pot of soup! Tastes like summer time again! Your sausage tomatoes will likely be very good this way.

Also, do be sure to try them sliced. I grow one large paste/plum tomato which has the most intense flavor of any tomato I've ever tasted. It's wonderful sliced. When dehydrated it's actually as good as dried fruit!

George
Tahlequah, OK

Paste Tomatoes you say? I will turn bumper crops of paste tomatoes into

Bruschetta. Chop it up and bake with a little olive oil , garlic and basil on top of bread until its as juicy as you like. A little heat makes them very juicy. If you like the bread to stay crunchy then a little cheese on the bottom will form a hydrophobic layer. Some parmeson on top is nice too. I also made bruschetta pizza last year. We were having some form of this twice a week because its just that darn good not to mention quick and easy during the work week.

Chili. I made a black bean and ground lamb chili last year and I am ready to repeat.I really piled the tomatoes on and it was so nice an juicy I think it was some sort of tomato heaven.

Bean dip. Refried beans(made from dry beans of course) + tomatoes.

Salsa is a must. I used a trick that is used in Chinese cuisine and used rice flour/corn starch to bind up the extra juice.You can do this if you are looking for the texture of commercial Salsa.

Garden tomato sauce. Herbs, and olive oil as well as carrots, and celery are typical in Italy and there is a version for every village or even every block.

http://www.fooddownunder.com/cgi-bin/recipe.cgi?r=199451

That scratches the surface.

Hello justaguy2,

" I agree with the salsa idea. Not that I disagree with any of the other suggestions, just that I like salsa :)

Using a 'regular' tomato the salsa is invariably 'juicy'. Not a bad thing, but the lower amount of water in the paste tomatos results in a salsa where the tomatos are easy to slice and dice and retain their shape and not flood the salsa with liquid. Very good in my opinion. It is more of a chunky type salsa."

As I said in another thread, in cooked salsa as opposed to say Pico de gallo taking some corn starch and cooking with the extra juice can bind up the liquid into a sauce aka salsa. I also made a cooked fresh hybrid where I strained the tomatoes and reduced the juice and then mixed a small amount of corn starch with some of the liquid added to the reducing tomato juice.

BTW any of that extra juice cooks down to a very nice shot of tomato juice.

Solanaceae,
Would you give more detail about the Bruschetta? What kind of bread? French? Italian? Is it toasted to begin with? You made my mouth water. I want to have some for supper.