How Does Our Garden Grow, Part V: Tomatomania!

One lesson we've all learned is that growing a vegetable garden requires patience—and lots of it. While you can wish and hope and plead for plants to grow and fruit to ripen, it's all going to happen on its own time. Case in point: tomatoes. We spend pretty most of July and August staring at the same hard green tomatoes, waiting for some sign that they would ripen. "Any day now" we told ourselves.

Patience, however, is rewarded. First the cherry tomatoes started to turn red, or in the case of the Black Cherry variety, purple. About a week later some color started appearing on the big boys—the Royal Hillbilly and Paul Robeson heirlooms. Now, it's a full-on tomatomania. The plants are churning out more tomatoes than we can eat, so we're giving quite a few away (which are never refused, of course), and finding creative ways to use our late-summer bounty.

Everyone's favorite variety of tomato seems to be the Black Cherry. They're sweet, but with an acidic edge. They're really really good and definitely on the list to grow next year. The Riesentraube cherry tomatoes are very tasty, too, which is a good thing since there are tons of them.

Of the larger beefsteak style, the pink Royal Hillbilly is the hands-down winner. It's the classic heirloom tomato with a fantastic sweet-tart flavor. I'm still not sure what to think about the Paul Robesons. So far they've been good, but not great, although they're certainly better than the tomatoes you get in the store. I suspect I'm just not picking them at the right time. They actually seem to have a better texture and flavor if they're picked when they still have a little green on them, so that's how we're rolling.

The squash we planted, too, is hitting its stride, sort of. While tons of surplus zucchini is something of a summer cliché, our squash plants have been kind of sad, producing just a handful of viable fruit. What we've gotten has been really good, but there's just not that much of it. One zucchini plant seems to have just given up altogether, while the others produce intermittently. Many of the little squash turn yellow and fall off the plant before their flowers even open. I'm thinking it's due to our unseasonably cool weather this summer, but as long as we're getting something I won't give up hope.

So, what have we been doing with our tomatoes, other than giving them away to lucky friends and neighbors? We've made a lot of the usual suspects, like amazing BLTs and Caprese salads. We've also made a pretty fantastic cherry tomato pizza using the good Trader Joe's pizza dough, fresh mozzarella, olive oil, and oregano and basil from our herb garden.

While the children still eye the tomatoes suspiciously, they've been adventurous enough to sample most of the things we've made, even pronouncing some of them "delicious".

One recipe I invented last night for dinner is a cream of heirloom tomato soup. I tried to keep it as fresh and simple as possible to let the flavor of the ripe tomatoes come through. We accompanied this with grilled white cheddar cheese and apple sandwiches, using the apples we picked last week at Gabriel Farm up near Sebastopol.

If you've got tons of tomatoes in your backyard garden, give it a try. You'll need:

• 2 pounds of big juicy heirloom tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and chopped
• 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
• 1 small onion, diced
• 1 clove garlic, crushed and coarsley chopped
• 1 cup water or vegetable stock
• 2 tablespoons creme fraiche or heavy cream
• 6 fresh basil leaves, cut in a chiffonade
• Salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

Peel tomatoes by slicing a shallow X in the bottom and blanching in boiling water for 30 seconds—the peels will just slip off.

Heat olive oil in a saucepan, then add garlic and onion and saute over medium heat until soft and translucent, about 5 minutes. Add chopped tomatoes, stir to combine, and cook for 2 minutes or until thickened a little. Add water and bring to boil, then turn heat to low and let simmer for 10 minutes.

Puree soup (an immersion blender is the easiest thing to use here), then add creme fraiche and stir until it's incorporated into the soup. Taste the soup, and add pepper and salt. Serve in cups with basil strips sprinkeled on top. This recipe makes about four cup-sized servings of soup, but can easily be doubled or tripled if you want to make more.