A Tale of Tomatoes- James

I realized last night that we've used the same tomato sauce as a base for at least one dish at each of our last three community dinners.

Almost all the tomatoes we've been using recently began their life at All-Seasons Farm. This sauce; however, began it's culinary life as a topping for pasta. We started with sauteeing onion (Barbee Farms) and Garlic Scapes (Coldwater Creek), added some zucchini (KYF Garden) and bell peppers (Barbee), dumped a bunch of those tomatoes in and let them cook, and finished with some basil from the garden. Delicious and Simple. However, we made a little too much, and it was still around come Sunday.

Sunday's dinner was interesting. We started thinking there might be 10 people around, if we got lucky. We ended up successfully feeding 18, with the tomato sauce playing a solid supporting role role in our adaptation of this Zucchini Cups recipe. Also featured were Swiss-chard-stuffed Patty Pan Squash (chard courtesy of Coldwater Creek, squash from the Barbees), grilled leeks (also Barbee) with a mustard sauce, baba ganoush (with Barbee eggplant), and a garlic scape pesto/Goat Lady Chevre/homemade yogurt dip that I was really proud of. We also ate a lot of melon (Canteloupe and Watermelon from the Barbees, again).

Having successfully cleaned out the fridge Sunday, we were faced with the clean out the fridge-after cleaning out the fridge meal. Or rather, the leftovers meal. Our hero, the tomato sauce, went through another transmutation, this time to something that vaguely resembled chili. This time we again started with onion and garlic (from the same folks as the first time), then added some summer squash, a couple jalapenos (KC Farms), a lot of cumin, and some cooked ground beef. Once those cooked some, we dumped in the remainder of the zucchini filling, the remainder of a jar of Yah's Best Salsa, and a few more tomatoes, for good measure. Very casual, real filling. A fitting end for our hero.