What do you do when you have a handful of tomatoes from the farmer’s market that are starting to get wrinkly but you don’t want to use them just yet? Easy .. you skin them, and not-can them. This is super easy, super fast, and it’ll give you an extra 7-10 days of tomato life.
Start with your tomatoes that are starting to get wrinkly and old. Here I have one from the grocery store and 3 from the farmer’s market two Saturdays ago.
One at a time, plunge the tomatoes into a pot of boiling water and let them sit there for about 2 minutes. Don’t leave them much longer than that – you don’t want to cook them, just to loosen the skins.
Add the next tomato the boiling water, and remove the first one to an ice water bath for another 1-2 minutes.
When you take the tomato out of the ice water, the skin will begin to slip right off. You can probably peel it off in 2 or 3 large chunks with your fingers.
Shove the peeled tomatoes into a jar or a bowl, put a lid on them, and stick them in the fridge.
Now, if we were canning these, we’d leave head room, add some liquid, and process them in a boiling water bath – and they’d last for months in their jars. But these .. these aren’t meant to be preserved. They’re just meant to keep for another week or so until we have something to cook them in. They’re great to throw into some rice, chop up and toss into a casserole, make salsa with, or … as you’ll see in a future post, add to a veggie lasagna.
Do you have to do this with your tomatoes? Of course not. But if you’re a household of 2, as we are, and you have leftover tomatoes that you don’t want to waste, it’s a great way to get some extra shelf life (or fridge life out of your tomatoes) for about 10 minutes worth of work. And you still have all the goodness and flavor of your fresh tomatoes!
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