Tomato Pie

Tomato season is a core memory of my childhood. I come by my love of fresh tomatoes honestly. Both sides of the family are obsessed. Growing up, my mom would take me with her to a tomato patch outside of town in the summer. She would pick giant buckets of tomatoes and bring them back home. She would always distribute some of the bounty to friends and neighbors.

Picking tomatoes in the field likely came natural to my mother. After all, she did grow up on a farm and things like wildlife (read: snakes) never sketched her out. Me on the other hand? Not a fan of wildlife in any way, shape or form.

As an adult, tomato season is one of the only things about summer that I find appealing (this heat can go kick rocks). There is a local farm on the outskirts of town near where Danny works that has the best produce in town. This year I joined their CSA program for a month and a half they kept me well stocked with local produce.

At the end of July they announced that they were shutting down for the month of August to plan for their next crop. Because they had a ton of tomatoes still in the field they were offering people the chance to come pick boxes. Likely because they know that a lot of their demographic is lazy (me) they were also offering 25 lb pre picked boxes of tomatoes. I sent Danny out to the farm pick up a box, which is how I wound up with a giant box of tomatoes on my kitchen counter one random Thursday evening.

I feel like I did my mom proud with this project. I let my dad come and pick out as many as he wanted. I gave some to friends. And even after all that I was left with an enormous surplus. My mom would have probably gotten to work canning the leftover tomatoes. But, canning/preserving is a part of her cookbook that I have been steering clear of because I find it intimidating.

So, I wound up making tomato pie. I was surprised with this one. I had fairly low expectations but this exceeded them. The leftovers held up surprisingly well. I thought that it would get runny and unedible, but, that was not the case here at all. I will definitely file this away for next tomato season.