Tomato Season

Tomatoes; it's what's for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a delicious few weeks when we can pick fresh from the vine and carry them into the kitchen.

In my garden this year I planted, Supersweet 100 (the smallest of these), Chocolate Cherry (on the left in the colander) and Persimmon (the larger yellow one). I also planted San Marzo which are not in this photo.

 From simple slices to have on the breakfast toast...

 as ingredients for the lunchtime sandwich (quick aside here, the prettier looking ones in the above photo are heirloom tomatoes from our CSA farm share while the sliced one is the San Marzo variety)

or for a riff on Pasta Primavera for dinner, the season, in my garden at least, peaked the last week of August.

The Persimmon were labelled as a medium size fruit. H'mm, that one on the scales is 1 lb 2 1/2 oz and that is not the only one I had at this size. Those San Marzos are a bit of a disappointment as there is not much flesh inside them. But it is always fun to try new varieties.

 That multi-color heirloom tomato looked even prettier when sliced on the plate and complimented with the cut chocolate cherry and the one supersweet 100 (which actually wasn't all that sweet altho it was prolific and the vine is enormous - thank goodness I planted just the one plant!)

Now I don't want you to think all is sweetness and light in the tomato patch. Just when I was thinking I had escaped early blight and bugs I had the unhappy surprise of finding the tomato hornworm on one of the San Marzo plants. I dispatched with great haste the first three I found and this one? I left it there because the wasps had already taken care of it for me.

Ingredients for homemade pizza night.

 Going into the oven with a base of sliced fresh tomatoes rather than a tomato sauce,

 and coming out of the oven. Pepperoni and mushroom got added during the cooking time.

The tomato season is co-incident with the peach season. Ordinarily I buy just enough peaches to eat them cut as fresh fruit for, yes, breakfast, lunch or dinner. But a couple of Sundays ago when at the farmers market they had 20lb boxes of slightly blemished fruit at a bargain price. Chef G decided he'd like to try canning them.

 I'm not sure he realized how much work it would be as it grew into a two day effort.

 A peach sunset...

and the real thing. It all looks delicious.