07 September 2016

Four little jars

So you take 40 little Juliet tomatoes, cut them in half, and dry them in the oven for 10 hours, not including letting them stay in the warm over overnight. What do you get? (See my post yesterday for the method. And here's an even more interesting method — dry them on the dashboard of your car!)


You get four very little jars of dried tomatoes. It doesn't seem like much, but it's 10 tomatoes per jar. And it certainly is a space-efficient way to store home-grown tomatoes for wintertime enjoyment. If you re-constitute them in hot water, one jar at a time, you get a really nicely flavored tomato liquid as well as the tasty tomatoes themselves. You can also just put them into a soup or a sauce and let them re-hydrate that way. By the way, I've never seen sun- or otherwise-dried tomatoes in our supermarkets here in Saint-Aignan, so I make my own.


Above is another oven-baked ratatouille that I made a few days ago. I put a layer of sliced tri-color bell peppers on the bottom of the baking dish and then arranged standing rows of tomato, zucchini, and eggplant over the top of them. Here's a link to a photo. The ratty-tat-too got baked for an hour or more in a slow oven. Walt told me yesterday that he's going to have to pick a lot more eggplants this week...

18 comments:

  1. How perfect to photograph them against that green background. Such dried tomatoes are a treasure...I've done them in a hydrator when I've had enough to make it worthwhile, but this year we may not even get ten tomatoes altogether, and they are all rather small! Your ratatouille looks wonderful. I have to make this again. Luckily there are more and more farm stands in my area.

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  2. Looks good...
    in the dehydrator it would take 18hrs at 145 Farenheit...
    the book says 9... but after 9hrs they always look leathery but are still wet in the middle... as you illustrated perfectly yesterday.
    That one would be a good wall picture.

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    1. And if an Aubergine plant is an Eggplant in the States...
      won't Walt be picking Eggs?
      Actually, there is a very nice white Aubergine plant that produces creamy-white egg shaped fruit....

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    2. I remember a time when all eggplants in the U.S. were white and looked like big eggs. Nowadays eggplants are purple but the name stuck. I don't know if the plant is called an "eggplant plant" or what.

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    3. Aha... thanks, Ken... that explains the name then....
      and must be American-origin seed that I saw on our allotment, growing eggs!
      A friend won 1st prize in the "Any Other Vegetable not in Schedule" class...
      at one of our Summer Shows, with a wonderful pair of "eggs"....
      allotment shows are very "big" in the UK!!

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    4. I can imagine that 'eggplant' meant a plant on which 'eggs' grew. And then the 'eggs' were called the 'eggplant fruit' or the 'eggplant vegetable'. Names like that got shortened to just 'eggplant' meaning not the plant but the fruit. It sounds right to me to say 'eggplants', plural, meaning 'aubergines'.

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  3. One name that is going to stick is ratty-tat-too !

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  4. You remember white eggplant?? I have never heard of white eggplant.

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  5. I am suffering from a need for ratatouille now ... homemade.

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  6. I loved the article about drying tomatoes in a Subaru. Once on a trip to Florida we used the car to dry our clothes- almost as fast as a dryer! I made that ratatouille and Walt's pear tart last weekend. Both were delicious- the tart got raves because it's different from the usual sorts around here. I'll be making both again.

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  7. Dry the aubergine too. It is extremely good.

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    1. Thank you for that Susan... We seem to be likely to be well supplied on that front, too, this year.

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    2. Thanks for the idea, Susan. It would be nice to have re-hydrated eggplant slices for gratins like moussaka over the winter.

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    3. I used to buy dried aubergine all the time in the UK. We used it as snack food as well as a pantry staple. Tim is also drying zucchini and using it like crisps. Also very good.

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  8. Love the idea of car as mobile dehydrator. I'm going to try that for courgette crisps.

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