5 Tasty Ways to Eat Your Tomato Harvest All Year

CC BY 2.0. Klearchos Kapoutsis
jarred tomato sauce

jeffreyw/CC BY 2.0

Hello tomato harvest time. If your garden (or farmer's market, or neighbor's garden) is suddenly overwhelming you with fresh tomatoes, don't be intimidated, start filling the pantry.


1. Slow Roasted Tomato Sauce

Tomato sauce is a no-brainer way to use up tomatoes, and this recipe calls for just a few simple ingredients -- 5 pounds of overripe Romas, garlic, salt, basil, thyme, and olive oil -- and basic technique: Jerry roasted his quartered tomatoes at 175 degrees overnight.


2. Whole or Halved Tomatoes Packed in Water

whole jarred tomatoes

ohmeaghan/CC BY 2.0


You'll start by dipping the tomatoes in boiling water until the skins break open -- which should take less than a minute -- and removing the skins and cores and adding lemon juice and salt to the jarred tomatoes. Then you can either follow the raw pack or hot pack directions, depending on how you plan to use them.

3. Sun-Dried Tomatoes

CC BY 2.0. Klearchos Kapoutsis

Klearchos Kapoutsis/CC BY 2.0

Tricia Callahan of Once a Month Mom offers 30 days of make-ahead meals each month (and the how-to for putting them all together) targeted at parents who don't have time to cook every night. But she also offers plenty of tips and suggestions for people who aren't able to spend a full weekend stocking the freezer -- including this how-to for Homemade Sun-Dried Tomatoes.

She recommends pitting cherry tomatoes before drying them in the oven and storing them sumberged in olive oil in the refrigerator so they last "for a long time to come!"

4. Yellow Tomato and Basil Jam

yellow tomatoes

tvol/CC BY 2.0

Colleen pointed us toward Food in Jars' roundup of ways to preserve small tomatoes -- think freezing, dehydrating, pickling, and more -- but what really caught our eye was a recipe for yellow tomato and basil jam.


5. Country Western Ketchup

homemade ketchup

photoverulam/CC BY-SA 2.0

Maybe it never occurred to you to make your own ketchup -- but if you're preserving tomatoes, now's the perfect time to try it.

