Michael and I along with his brother, Thomas, went to the Farmer’s Market. It’s a hundred year old institution in our city. It is what you do on a Saturday morning or, in our case, a Tuesday morning. My goal was to score some fresh veggies cheaper than I could get them at Big Box Mart. Started my trip with a big fat sugar free caramel mocha from Sweet Street. I picked up some dried garlic, cayenne and garam masala there, too. (I had an Indian co-worker at Borders 10 years ago. Reza lamented that he had to travel to Chicago to get the spices he liked. I asked him what he was looking for.  He insisted I wouldn’t know the spices or where to get them. When he relented and told me he needed garam masala, turmeric, curry powder, and star anise, I said “Oh, sure, you can get those at Sweet Street or Garden Patch.” Yeah, this transplanted New York Girl’s got some mad food-finding skills.)

I bought 10 pounds of potatoes and a cucumber. I went around the corner to look at the boxes of “bruised” tomatoes. These are tomatoes that might have a soft or moldy spot. I picked up three pint containers. “I’ll take these.” Three pints for $4.50. The produce lady took a stance, looked me in the eye and said, “How about this box for fifteen dollars?” It’s a 25 pound box. That’s 60¢ a pound. Hell’s yeah!

I must have had sucker written on my forehead. This is what we brought home:

The bowl on the left contains the perfectly good tomatoes I picked out of the “bruised” box.

Once we went through all of the tomatoes this is what wound up in the “good” tomato bowl. We will eat tomatoes out of this bowl for a few days. It took an hour for Michael and I to core and seed the remaining 15 pounds or so. The bruised tomatoes got turned into this:

I had three pots full of tomatoes bubbling. When they were cooked down, the liquid was skimmed off (frozen for soup), and they were processed with the stick blender. They looked like this:

Oh, look at that tomato-y heaven. I could swim in that…

I rescued some of the tomatoes for stewed tomatoes (good for soup). Today we noticed the “good” tomatoes were going to hell so I made a roasted tomato and onion soup. Recipe coming soon.