Yid.Dish: What to Do When Your Garden Explodes in Bounty
Q: What do you do when you have so many home grown zucchini your friends won’t answer the door when you try to share your harvest?
A: Find a car with an open window.
The triumph and the tragedy of the summer growing season is the sheer fecundity of gardens and farms. How to partake of fruits and vegetables at their peak without relying on the same old recipes?
Lois M. Burrows and Laura G. Myers offer a mouth-watering solution with their book, Too Many Tomatoes … Squash, Beans, and other Good Things; a Cookbook for When Your Garden Explodes.
Originally published in 1976 and reissued in 1991, this book would be completely at home on shelf beside Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. The recipes focus on more than 20 vegetables that are typically abundant in late summer gardens. The ingredients are generally few and simple, leaving the glory of the vegetables to shine.
The recipes draw from diverse cultures such as Greek, Italian, Mexican, Spanish and Midwestern American. They range from long-standing favorites such as herbed snap bean salad, coleslaws and corn fritters to the exotic and unexpected such as tomato cake and broccoli guacamole. From canapés to soup to sauces to main dishes, this cookbook has it covered.
Here’s the recipe for fresh tomato cake. It’s spicy and lightly sweet.
1 cup dark brown sugar
½ cup shortening
2 eggs
½ cup chopped nuts
½ cup chopped dates
½ cup raisins
2 cups peeled, cubed tomatoes
3 cups sifted flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon nutmeg
½ teaspoon salt
8 ounces cream cheese
½ cups confectioner’s sugar
3 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon vanilla
Pinch of salt
Cream the sugar and shortening. Add eggs, nuts, dates, raisings and tomatoes. Sift dry ingredients into the tomato mixture. Pour into a greased and floured 9” x 13”pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.
Serves 8.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
