Tomatoes…if you’ve ever grown them, you’ve probably found yourself in a place where you have more than enough and are looking for new ways to make the most of your harvest! We’ve never grown tomatoes on this scale until this last summer, and we’ve got plenty of late season tomatoes still coming….oh, what to do?
The pantry shelf is lined with canned tomatoes, crushed tomatoes, pasata, tomatoe sauce and ‘sundried’ tomatoes. But still there are more tomatoes harvested every few days.
So thank God for the online library catalogue, where I was able to find “Tomato, A Fresh From the Vine Cookbook” by Lawrence Davis-Hollander. what grabbed my attention was the fact that his recipes are based on heirloom tomatoes. Yes, you can make most tomato recipes with any kind of tomatoes, but the flavour variety of heirlooms is much more contrasted and I think the sugar content of homegrown vine-ripened tomatoes is higher also.
Lawrence has really gone all out in providing a wide range of tomato recipes. It’s expected you’d see recipes for tomato soup, paste, salsa etc, but then there’s some unusual (yet intriguing) recipes such as Bloody Bull (a beverage of Irish pale ale and tomato juice) and “Green Tomato Chocolate Cake” (fully intend to make that one when I get my hands on some suitable beer…yes, it has beer in there along with the green tomatoes!). There are about 150 recipes!
He also tucks in snippets of tomato trivia about various tomato festivals, health benefits of tomatoes and some info on which varieties of heirloom tomatoes you might like to try growing for yourself.
Mmmm, just looking at a picture of the ‘Tomato, Watermelon and Ricotta Salad’ right now!
Many of the recipes within this book have been contributed by celebrity chefs, and throughout the book there are profiles on some of these chefs. Most of the recipes are for fresh dishes, but there is a chapter on preserving the harvest…in case you’re like me and want to save some of the tomato goodness for later in the year!
So if you’re looking for a one-stop tomato recipe book, give this one a go 🙂