I'd Rather Be Napping (But I'm Hanging Out With Tomatoes)

It appears I'll be spending my whole week with tomatoes. And with my children, naturally. Sometimes both at once. I'm beginning to feel jealous of my cat, who can slip upstairs and burrow under the covers whenever she'd like. But my cat has to eat cat food, and I am allowed to eat what it turns out is fairly good chutney, so I will keep my own life, and keep cutting tomatoes and mixing them up with various other ingredients to get things which are hopefully all edible. Round one of chutney - to which I added mango and apple - was a success, so I'm feeling good about my chances.

At this very moment, there is a slow cooker full of tomatoes and onions bubbling away on my kitchen counter. I overestimated the amount of tomatoes and other fruit that would fit in my largest stock pot, so something needed to be done with the extra tomatoes and onions which had already been cut and salted. I figured I'd try to make pasta sauce. I put in oregano, basil, rosemary, parsley, some frozen garlic cubes, and a good bit of olive oil. It smells heavenly now. We'll see how it is after it's simmered overnight.

Tomorrow will be another day of chutney making, this time with apples and sultanas. If the pasta sauce turns out well, I've got enough tomatoes and onions for another batch already washed, cut, and salted. And then there are still more tomatoes. I know. This is out of control. I should probably quit before my house descends into the kind of chaos normally observed on an episode of Hoarders. But I just can't do it. I picked those tomatoes, and I intend to use them.

My plan at the moment is to use the last couple of kilograms to make salsa. This is why I have two slow cookers, so that I can be making more than one experimental sauce type product at a time. Why make just one sauce when I could make two? Or in this case, three, if we include the chutney that will be on the stove. There's actually room for a second large stock pot on the stove, and I considered dividing out some of the tomatoes for something else exciting, but then I figured I'd better quit while I was ahead. Or, um, maybe just not terribly behind.

Because did I mention I am also making banana bread tomorrow? I am. If I'm on the avoiding-food-waste crazy train, I may as well ride it all the way to the last stop.