Yet another squash-and-tomato dish.

Yes, it's that time of year, when you neighbors won't answer the door for fear of having a wiffle-ball-bat-sized zucchini thrust into their arms, when the receptionist at your local chiropractor's office says thanks, but no thanks to the lunch sack of tomatoes you thoughtfully brought to your appointment (most assuredly not to influence the favorable timing for future visits) pointing to the three already taking up valuable desk space, when even your resident rodent and deer pests tire of the offerings and repair back to the forest to browse on wild berries and seeds.

If you are, as I am, experiencing diminishing results in your efforts to share your garden surplus now is the time to reach for your great-grandma's recipe box. Because it has been only fairly recently that it's been possible to eat produce out of season, older cookbooks and recipe collections are a treasure trove of use-it-or-lose-it ideas for whatever vegetable or vegetables is most vexing at any given moment.

I remember my paternal grandmother making a dish similar to the one above. I couldn't have been more than 8 or 9 when my family visited her at her home south of San Francisco and I learned what tomato surplus really means. She and her husband planted probably a hundred or more tomatoes of varying kinds on their farmette (along with all kinds of nut trees, fruits, berries and more - a great place to visit as a kid, and all the better with a grandmother who loved to cook and preserve) and every night we ate some variation of this, a kind of tian.

The basic procedure is simple and one I've remembered for these decades after my grandmother's initial lesson, and even better it can be utilized with virtually any vegetable. For the dish pictured above, I sliced up two largish yellow squashes and a number of roma tomatoes and layered them in the gratin dish along with maybe a quarter cup of fairly finely diced red onion and a couple cloves of diced garlic. Next, I poured a bit of chicken broth over and topped with about half a cup bread crumbs (I'm one of those cheapies who make my own with the stale remains of my bread, biscuits and pizza doughs) seasoned with a good amount of black pepper, some salt and basil and a few tablespoons of grated parmesan cheese.

Baked in a goodly hot oven (maybe 375 or even 400) until the veggies are soft and the topping well-browned, this is a delicious addition to any summer meal or even a meal in itself with a salad and a glass of decent white wine.

We've had tian in one form or another several times a week all month. If you've got eggplant, potatoes, squash, onions, herbs, tomatoes or, you know, whatever, you can do what you like and it will still be delicious.

In other news, we've fired the realtor and the new prospect for representation is here so I've got to run. A friend once told me that selling a house is the most painful thing you can ever do yourself willingly and for which there is no "it was all worth it" ending. At first I thought she was being a bit dramatic, but lately I'm definitely inclined to believe her.

We're back from Buffalo and I feel obligated to report that both the trip and the weather were glorious. This makes the third year in a row that our little family has decamped to Western New York in search of at least one decent summer week and we were thrilled that the city of my youth delivered once again. What more can you ask than a full week of the grandparents picking up lunch bills, dinnertime cookouts with all the cousins/grandchildren, two birthday parties, golf every day for the Boy Wonder, playtimes in the park, a pickup softball game, running through two big jugs of blowing bubbles, a whole bagful of Lilly Pulitzer dresses handed down to Entropy Girl from her older cousins and daily HGTV-fests for yours truly? Every vacation should be so.

And now, to business. A reader asks:

How do you scald tomatoes? Do you just boil them?

Pretty much. I just put on a large-ish pot of water to boil and then when it reaches a decently active stage reduce the heat slightly and pop in three or four tomatoes. After a few minutes their skins will split and they can be removed with a strainer to a collander to drain and cool.

As they cool, they'll resemble sad little deflating balloons. I don't bother touching mine until they've pretty much lost all their heat, but if you're in a hurry you can move forward as soon as you can handle them without too much pain. If you're going to puree instead of dice the tomatoes can be dealt with much more quickly since you can just dump them into a food mill skins and all and turn the crank. I have a mill but prefer my tomatoes in a dice.

As I've said, I generally dump my prepared tomatoes into a freezer container until I have enough to can maybe a dozen or more half-pints at once. Other people can as they go and do just two or three jars at once. Whatever makes you happy.

If you dropped in hoping I'd have a visually stunning and technically engaging treatise discussing the finer points of canning tomatoes I am deeply sorry that I (or rather blogger, or maybe my computer) will be letting you down. It was here and then it was not and I don't have the time, what with tomorrow's embarking on a nine-plus-hour car trip with the kids and all, to recreate the entire post.

And so not to make this all a complete loss I will share the following:

1) The USDA no longer recommends water bath canning for tomatoes on the grounds that many of the newer varieties have been bred to be much lower in acid than their love apple ancestors. I, myself, continue to do so although of course I cannot and will not suggest to you, my bloggy friend, that it's a good idea. I plant primarily Amish Paste and Roma varieties and since these are considered heirloom (i.e., pre-technological intervention in tomato breeding) I throw caution to the wind.

2) However, I do add salt and lemon juice to each jar thereby hopefully bringing yet more safety to my devil-may-care approach to the whole affair.

3) Because garden tomatoes tend to come in two or three at a time (at least in my garden), it can be tricky to have enough at any given time to actually can anything. I can almost everything in half-pints and even these smallish jars might require 8 to 12 (or more) Romas to fill. My somewhat unorthodox approach is to scald, peel, seed and dice the fruits as they are ready and freeze them in a large container until I have enough to actually make it worthwhile to get out the kettle. Not only is this tidier (good for when your house is on the market, for example) and more efficient, but the outcome is no less tasty than if you bought a bushel at the farmer's market and canned them all at once.

4) Although I am pretty picky about using only absolutely ripe tomatoes, I have no problem with cutting off a bad spot and scalding the remainder. Some people get all antsy about it and say that you're watering down the flavor if you scald cut tomatoes but I figure mine are going into soups, stews, and chillies anyway so it's not like that's a big deal. I'm totally onboard with seeking prime tomato taste for your tomato sandwiches or your tomato-mozzerella salads, but no one is going to get me all flipped out about tomatoes that will end up having a quarter cup of chili powder, a pound of beans and a cut-up steak all mixed up with them.

5) Scalding is easy and I recommend that you sever ties immediately with anyone who tries to scare you into thinking otherwise. Bring a large pot of water to boil, add the tomatoes a couple at a time and simmer away until their skins split and/or start to look kind of wrinkly. Remove them with a slotted spoon to a collander to drain and cool. When they're good to handle (that is, you won't burn yourself), peel away the skin - it should slip right off - cut away the ends, slip the seeds out with your hands or a spoon and dice right into a bowl. I don't sweat getting all the pieces uniform in size, but if that's important to you then by all means sweat it. If I have enough to can, then I do. Otherwise, the pieces are dumped into a large freezer container until I have enough to can (see above).

6) I tend not to get fancy with these and don't add herbs, onions, garlic or anything else to make them "recipe ready" as they say in the packaged food biz. Such ammendments really are more suited to pressure canning and, despite my apparent cavalier attitude toward the USDA's recommendations for tomatoes, including them runs counter to my risk-management philosophy.
And that's it. In a good year I have enough tomatoes to see us nearly through the winter. In a not-so-good year I have to start buying commercially canned tomatoes sometime in February or March. Despite our slow start to the season, this is looking like a better than average tomato year; we eat our fill with plenty left over for the no-fresh-tomato months.

The first tomato salad.


But not the last! The yellow pears are coming in fast and furious now so every night sees us with some kind of salad on the table. This one had a bit of plum tomato, mozzarella and green bell pepper dressed in black pepper, salt, olive oil, red wine vinegar and basil. Last night's had no pepper, but more red tomato and an addition of very finely diced red onion. What tonight's will bring remains to be seen. Brainiac thinks I ought to save some for pickling. Perhaps.

I don't think I'm ready for canning the tomatoes just yet. I like to save that until I simply cannot fathom eating another fresh off the vine, which probably won't happen for another two weeks or so. Then I will start to can as a defense mechanism.

In the meantime I've got a loaf of white bread in the oven. I'm so not a good bread baker, but I gladly suffer through for a tomato, mayo and basil sandwich. One a year is usually enough. And then there are tians, fresh tomato pastas, tomato pies (there's a great sounding tomato pie in one of Laurie Colwin's books that I've meant to make for years), tomatoes just eated with a sprinkling of salt, fresh salsas and so much more.

In addition to tomatoes I seek out other signs of long, hot summers.



I'm kind of suprised this and its twin bloomed. We bought them at the very tail end of last summer from a local nursery's scratch-n-dent shelf. They looked wretched all winter and through the spring but I think the payoff is worth a bit of unsightly foliage.

Has it really been a week since my last post? I'd been thinking it's just a couple days. What have I done with this week? There was the visit to the pool, Entropy Girl being stung by an unidentified insect, company for dinner. These things must have comprised the week because I'm coming up with nothing else.

The garden situation has stabilized somewhat. Judicious applications of a calcium ammendment seems to have mitigated the blossom end rot problem so I'm now getting more and better tomatoes, both of the roma and amish paste varieties. Beefsteaks aren't behind and some kind of unknown yellow pear variety is doing well, too.

I'm also getting a good deal of summer squash. I'm going to have to cancel my long-planned zucchini post (if you were waiting with breath held for it, see Meg who will hook you up - I'm making her slaw tomorrow) because all of the zucchinis died, each and every one. In their place grew up vigorous yellow squashes which I have decided to treat as though there were zucchini. I had always thought of summer squash and zucchini to be kind of flip sides of the same coin, produce aisle twins sold separately more for aesthetic reasons than anything else. So color me suprised to fine that one can thrive in the same garden where one utterly perishes.

Let's see...what else? Oh, yes, bell peppers doing marginally well. I've harvested three so far and it looks like there may be more yet. The corn is corning and the horseradish is settling in nicely. This weekend I'm going to clear out the lettuce bed and prepare for more radishes and something else, but I haven't decided what yet.

In other news, I also unboxed my sewing machine to get to work on a Christmas gift for my aunt. I really, really needed to have some kind of forward motion on something and decided to spend some time on this countryish-looking stuffed snowman. While I had the machine accessible I also fixed two pairs of the Boy Wonder's pajamas, on which the elastic had completely given way (such is the nature of hand-me-downs). I managed to turn down the existing waistband and thread new elastic through, delighting him thoroughly. He had watched every step of the process, actually sitting still at the kitchen table while I worked and asking all kinds of questions ("Why is the round thing going so fast? Where does the needle go when it goes down like that? Can I touch the thread while you sew?").

I feel good to have just punted already. Sure, we're trying to sell the house but somewhere we've forgotten that we still are living in it. It's not some kind of diorama play-acting the part of a family home, it actually is a family home and if that means the needlepoint is left on the ottoman before a showing, so be it.