The good news here is that this post has nothing to do with papal enclaves, or resigning popes, or anything like that. I suppose you could say it has something to do with Italy – or, well, my attempt at Italian food for this week. But – this has to do not with Roma, but with ROMAS!! Awesome little bundles of tomato-y goodness!!
Last summer we grew bunches and bunches of tomatoes – Tommy Toes, Black Krim, German Queen, and some other kind that’s escaping my brain at the moment. Our crop of tomatoes kept on-a-comin’, as we say here in the South. We did what any good two-chick couple living on a hill in the middle of an otherwise urban space would do when they don’t know (yet) how to can food… We froze stuff!
So, yesterday I made spaghetti sauce. Or – sort of made spaghetti sauce. (Feel free to let me get away with saying my sauce was Italian, and that I actually made it…) You see, we have two kids, two cats, and two dogs. And tons of activities – school, soccer, swimming, homework, middle school drama… You get the picture. So, what we typically do is sort of doctor up sauces and the like. We start with some plain jane jar of something and then add stuff to it to make it much better and then….VIOLA!!! There’s dinner.
Ok – so it wasn’t really Italian or totally homemade at all.
BUT – it did include our Roma tomatoes we’d frozen!
I have to tell you what’s so awesome about this – if you freeze Romas raw, and then – when you’re ready to put them into sauce – pull them from the freezer and drop those bad boys into hot water and wait a minute or two, you can actually slip them right out of their skins and put what’s left into a sauce pan to cook down! So cool! The warning here is that the insides of the tomatoes tend to be like a water balloon – I learned this the hard way. It’s best to slit the skins with a sharp knife and THEN take the skins off. Otherwise you run the risk of having your clothes (and your kitchen) covered in tomato guts.
So, here are some pics — I left out pictures of the Romas without their skins. Wasn’t pretty… But the sauce DID turn out just great! It was a lovely addition to noodles! Topped the whole deal off with Parmesan. It was YUMMY!
The big freeze – Romas ready to go into the sauce!
Romas – Just after finding themselves in hot water!
Romas in hot water!
What the Romas wore…Pile of Roma skins.
Ladianne
I had no idea you could freeze tomatoes well. Do you blanch first?
Nope! No need for Blanch here!! Sheri’s mom told us about this little trick – - you just pick and freeze!! We don’t use pesticides, so we just picked them and froze them. You’re gonna end up throwing out the skins anyway… It’s so easy!