Remember when I had all those tomatoes? My cousin Michael, and I should be clear, because I have three of those, so my first cousin's husband, Michael, reminded me that I could freeze them to peel, rather than blanching them. Just toss them in the freezer, whole, and when they defrost the skins come off. I've done this with a handful of tomatoes, but never with a serious tomato bounty. At the time, I didn't have room in my freezer(s) for 27 pounds of tomatoes.
You can freeze tomatoes whole, though, when you have the space. You can't use them on a BLT afterwards (well, you can but you shouldn't) but for cooking, it's fantastic. So recently, I got a smaller load of plum tomatoes in my CSA and I just washed them and popped them in a gallon zipper bag in the freezer.
Then when I started feeling guilty about how I don't do much to take care of the 100 year old man* who lives on my street and looks after the block, I
decided to make sauce.
So the frozen tomatoes, now little red rocks, went into a pot of warm water, and one minute later, the skins were volunteering to come off. Very easy.
See the wrinkles? That's what I'm talking about. Pinch and peel. From there, I just made sauce.
*a note on hyperbole**: I say people are 100 all the time, and no one gets it. I mean, constantly, someone will respond - "Really, he's 100??" Probably not. He's probably in his early 90s. I don't ever ask him, because that's rude and as far as I can tell, he's 100. I have another neighbor I describe the same way. I picked this up a decade ago from Liz at the insurance agency, so Liz, if you're reading this, know what you've done to me in terms of describing the old. I bet if I started saying, "the 112 year old man," people would get it.
**a note on the word hyperbole: I must have been out sick on the day we covered this word in spelling class, because despite whatever typos and errors you see here, I'm actually a half-decent speller, and this one doesn't work for me. I think I was well into my 20s when I read the word, looked it up and said, "Oh, that's how you spell high-per-boly." To me, it reads less like exaggeration and more like "hyper bowl," which I imagine is some sort of futuristic sporting event. When I was in elementary school I read something about a girl wearing a "beribboned" dress (seriously?) and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what "berry boned" meant in fashion. There's a This American Life episode that I love called A Little Bit of Knowledge that addresses this. Including the mispronunciation of misled as mizled, which I happen to prefer. "I just felt so mizled," "The corporation intentionally mizled their shareholders." Yay. You should totally listen to it.
