Tomatoes: Forgive me, Mafalda, if I got this wrong

As tomato years go, it’s been kind of moderate. It isn’t one of those years where you have so many tomatoes on the vine that you just give up trying to pick them all. 

But it also hasn’t been a year of massive blight despite the wet weather. If you’ve lived here for a few years, you might remember that one very bad blight year, when everyone was worried that the soil would be contaminated for years to come.

That didn’t happen. Farms and gardeners have been happily growing tomatoes big and small since then. I blame this summer’s wet weather for the relatively moderate sweetness of this summer’s fruit; I think tomatoes want a lot of sun in exchange for coming off the vine tasting like candy. 

But counter-intuitively, I just read something online that indicates tomatoes also don’t thrive in too much heat. A blog called Our Makers Acres Family Farm claims confidently that tomato plants will stop setting fruit when temperatures are above 85 or 90 degrees during the day and above 75 degrees at night. I can’t speak for all of us here in the Tri-state region but I’ll bet we exceeded those thresholds this summer.

As a result, I’ve got plenty of small cherry tomatoes but not so many I don’t know what to do with them. And yes, now that you mention it, I would say there don’t seem to be a lot of new tomatoes growing on my vines. 

I’ve stopped growing full-size tomatoes; it seemed easier to just go to Paley’s in Sharon at the end of August, when farmer Charlie is so sick of tomatoes that he’ll almost beg you to take a box of tomatoes and just … just … get out of here.

Even Charlie has said this is a pretty moderate tomato year; not a bad one, but not a year in which he’s making a special effort to move those red orbs as fast as he can.

I don’t really even have enough tomatoes that I want to roast and freeze them; there aren’t enough of them.

And as a side health note, keep in mind that raw tomatoes are very healthy because they have vitamin C, which tends to disappear when you expose it to heat. But the cancer-fighting lycopene that’s found in tomatoes is only released when it’s exposed to heat.

But I did learn a very fast simple pasta sauce from my friend Tina’s mother, Mafalda Scoccolo, while I was visiting them in Seattle, Wash., last week.  As you have probably figured out, Mafalda (and Tina) are Italian.  The patriarch of the family, Armondo, is also an excellent farmer and thus the family has a lot of fresh-from-the-vine tomatoes (including my favorite small ones, called Juliets). 

Here’s what Mafalda does with those tomatoes, and I apologize because I don’t have a real recipe, just a loose set of instructions: Take your small tomatoes and cook them in a large deep skillet until they start to crack. Add a little water just to make them more saucy. Add chopped onions, garlic and red pepper flakes. Cook them until  they’re delicious. Use a hand held immersion blender if you have one to turn them into a lovely red sauce, the color of a burnt orange cashmere sweater. 

After Mafalda drains her pasta, she adds the noodles to the large skillet full of cooked tomatoes. There are herbs involved, some basil and probably some parsley. There’s some parmesan cheese (you’ll be happy to know that Mafalda uses the pre-grated kind that comes in a container from the grocery store). 

Season to taste. Mangia.