Holy Tomatoes!

You guys are good. Those tentacle-y turnipy things were in fact kohlrabi. And that totally creepy white thing (that's still in my fridge and is giving me the nervous sweats since tomorrow is CSA day and I still haven't used it up)? That's a daikon--true in the flesh. I'll let you know what comes of it.

Last Thursday we scored about one and a half million tomatoes in our CSA basket. And I won't lie, I was a little heavy handed with the overflow bin. On Monday, we still had a bazillion tomatoes sitting in the crisper, so I went to work preserving.

I know nothing (NOTHING!) about canning, so I went another route--I made 'sun dried' tomatoes, and it was super easy.

First, I cut a bunch of tomatoes in half, laid them on a cookie sheet and sprinkled them with olive oil and salt:

Then I put them in a 200 degree oven. After 3 hours, the looked like this:

After 6 hours, they achieved the enlightened state of tomato Nirvana, and looked like this:

They'll last for a long ass time in the fridge, and they're quite freezable, too. I've looked around and found that for a Roma-sized tomato or larger, you'll want to let them go in the oven for 12-or-so hours. But these were weenie little suckers.

And I made some crushed tomatoes, too. As classy as it would have been to can 'em, I didn't. So into the depths of my freezer they'll go:

My friend Brianne--who happens to be the best cupcake photographer this side of the Mississippi--has a fantastical crushed tomato tutorial on her blog. Click on over you fools!