surplus

So remember my pumpkin problem from last year? Waaaay too many pumpkins to use and I had to keep searching for more recipes to use them up. Well, we did not plant any this year, though one did accidently grow from a discarded seed in the compost pile, so now we have a nice small manageable amount of pumpkins.

Perfect. I'll make a pie, a cheesecake, some muffins and be done with it. 

But wait: here's this year's gardening surplus problem. 

Tomatoes. Specifically GREEN tomatoes. 

Hubs was worried about frost, so he harvested everything and pulled up all the plants. And now their my problem. 

Because really, how often can you eat fried green tomatoes. And what else can you do with them.

And again, I say, thank you internets, because a quick search, though it did not yield tons of options, did at least provide me with a good handful. Today I finally got around to doing something about it, and decided to start with a simple sounding Green Tomato Cake.  Ta-Daaaa! Used up four cups of diced green tomatoes, and was a roaring success. Hubs calls it his new favourite cake. L.D. calls it "Tomato Pie Cake". I call it good. Though really, how could anything made with 2 whole cups of sugar taste bad?

I tweaked the recipe a bit by using half white and half whole wheat flour (because with all that sugar, who can taste the flour, might as well have some whole grains in there), used 1 cup white sugar and one cup brown sugar and put in a whole lot more spices. Like cloves, ginger, coriander and cardamom. And it was good. The top was all crunchy and lovely from the sugar. Sort of like a brownie texture. And you can still see the green tomato bits.

And it smelled AMAZING while it baked. And it didn't taste weird and tomato-y at all. I'll make this again, but next time I'm going to at least halve the sugar and see what happens. I didn't want to mess with it today, as I wasn't sure if the sugar did something important to the tomatoes. I'll try it again next week, just to compare, and then maybe rewrite the recipe to share here, if its good. 

And here's something to make you smile. Its the drawer in the kitchen where we keep the bibs, napkins, etc. The Little Dude was chattering away over at that end of the kitchen while I was washing up, and I finally looked over to see him emptying this drawer. He was sure that a train he was looking for was in here. "Fine," I told him, "You can pull all that stuff out, but you have to put it all back in when you are done looking." 

So he did. We've got to work on that. 

Comments

[Lisa D'Addio]

I'm sure it came up on your search, but I just have to mention that salsa verde is an absolutely delicious to use up lots of those tomatoes.