Call me crazy

After nurturing 10 tomato plants this summer and harvesting many pounds of tomatoes, I surprised myself and bought 5 pounds of tomatoes at the Farmers' Market.

I know it sounds crazy, but they had late season Early Girls (an oxymoron?) on sale for 50 cents/pound. Plus, I wanted to make a batch of Amy's Tomato Jam from Marisa McClellan's cookbook, Food in Jars: Preserving in Small Batches Year-Round.


Food in Jars cookbook & Early Girl tomatoes

Some of you are probably saying, "Tomato jam? That's crazy!" That's what I said when I read the recipe and when I made my first batch with heirloom tomatoes. But we said, "Oh, that's good!" when we tasted it for the first time. Amy's Tomato Jam is a delicious combination of sweet, spicy, and savory from a mixture tomatoes, sugar, fresh ginger, cinnamon, and red pepper flakes. The first thing you taste is a mildly sweet tomato, then when the jam is seemingly gone from your mouth, you get hit with the hotness of ginger and red pepper. Crazy.

The first batch yielded 4-1/2 cups from 5 pounds of heirloom tomatoes. Can you imagine? There was more than one pound of tomatoes in each half pint jar. I didn't realize there was so much water in the heirlooms but when I reduced the mass to get a jammy consistency, it was clear that a lot of the volume evaporated away. Crazy.

The Early Girls have a lower water content so I was able to get 6 cups from 5 pounds. That's more like it. Isn't it pretty? Pretty crazy, that is.


Amy's Tomato Jam

For those of you who are interested in trying the tomato jam, Marisa has the recipe on her blog: Recipe for Amy's Tomato Jam.