🍅🍅Easy Summertime Tomato Recipes!🍅🍅

Oh, I’ll tell you, if you folks could ever see what’s going on behind these cameras, sometimes it takes everything within me to keep my composure when we say hello. Well, hello, and welcome to At Home today. We’re just having a good time. And isn’t that what home’s all about, having a good time with your family, bring your friends in, and the silliest little things can gather momentum in a relaxed atmosphere, like around a dinner table or maybe in front of the television, or whatever, just the silliest things can get everybody laughing. And it’s so refreshing and it just gives you relief for a little while, until you have to face the struggles and the problems that you’re going through. But today, we’re talking tomatoes. Now, you say tomato and I say tomahto. You say potato, I say, no. The tomatoes are coming in by leaps and bounds, as they say. Can you just look at this? I hope the camera’s getting a good closeup because there are such varieties of tomatoes. You’ve got your big, these are like homegrown, right, wouldn’t you say, Dale, these are homegrowns? Like this, nice big ones. Here you have plum tomatoes. These are great for making sauce because they have less juice, more meat. Here’s the green tomatoes. Here’s the big plum tomatoes. These are, oh, everything in the kitchen that you make with tomatoes, this is the variety that you’re gonna want to use, if you want them meaty and less juice. Then you get the little cherry tomatoes. Then you have these, these are so good. You could like pick them off the vine, salt them down, and just eat them. This is like a delicacy, wonderful. Look at the variety. God doesn’t just give us one kind of tomato, he mixes it up, he gives you every kind. Now, I wanna show you this one. This is what I call a tomato. This tomato says something to me. It says, get a slice of toast and get the pepper and a little bit of onion, and have a sandwich. No, that’s what it says, because, well, you’ve gotta eat these now. You’ve gotta eat them while they’re in season and they’re ripe and they are so good. You know that tomatoes are really good for you? They’re full of all kind of vitamins and just things that are good for you. I was reading this, I saw this in the paper. I’ll have to put on my old glasses here. It says that tomatoes have vitamin C and A and are a good source of potassium and fiber. It says, “But best of all, these,” there’s tomatoes, you can use tomatoes in dishes that everybody will like. Because some people, when I was a kid, I didn’t like a raw tomato. I didn’t like just a fresh tomato, I liked it cooked into things. But as I got older, I had an appreciation for them. It also says that people eat up to 17 pounds of tomatoes a year. It also says that there is only 50 calories in like an average sized tomato. 50 calories, which is hardly any at all. And, of course, there’s no fat. Everybody’s talking about low fat. There’s all kinds of tomatoes. I mean, and you can make it into all kinds of dishes, but the important thing is, at this time of the year, when they’re all coming in so good and fresh, enjoy them. And today, we’re gonna show you a lot of the variety of dishes and things that you can do with fresh red tomatoes. And even some green ones. We’ll be right back, here’s today’s At Home Hint. Here’s today’s At Home Hint. To peel your tomatoes, take a fork, pierce them at the core, hold over the gas flame of your stove for a few seconds, turning them till you hear them crackling. Hold under cold running water and the skin slips off easily. If you’ve got a helpful hint you wanna share, we want to hear from you. Send your hint to At Home Hints, CTV, Wall, Pennsylvania, 15148-1499. We’re gonna make a classic dish that a lot of people make, and they fry them. It’s called fried green tomatoes, but they’re not really fried. We’re gonna do them in the oven. And what you do is, you take some, about four large green tomatoes, and you slice them down a fourth of an inch thick. And then we have two beaten eggs and a five-ounce can of evaporated milk. And that’s what we have here in this pie plate. We’re mixing this up with a third of a cup of water, salt and pepper, and flour. Now, we mixed that all together, and what you do is, you take your slice of green tomato. Somebody says, why would you want to eat them when they’re green? Because there’s a different flavor altogether. Completely different. And we’re gonna dip this first into the egg and the milk mixture. Then we’re gonna go into the flour. And you just dip back and forth into the flour. And then we’re gonna go back into the egg and milk mixture. See, this is a double batter to it. And then back into the flour. And cover it real good. And then we’re just gonna put that onto our cookie sheet. Okay, I’m gonna do that one more time so you can see. First of all, you take a slice of green, and you put it into the egg mixture. Both sides, cover it well. And then into the flour, cover it well, press it down there, very good. And then back into the egg mixture once again, and back into the flour. Now, that will give you two pans full, just like this. And the key, what you want to do is not to let them touch. You’re gonna put this into a 300, or sorry, 400-degree oven. And you’re gonna bake for 10 minutes and then turn them over and bake on the other side for 10 minutes. And you have oven-fried green tomatoes. Less grease, because there is no grease. I’m sure you could probably use the Egg Beaters, if you wanted to cut down on the fat that’s in the recipe. Very simple, very easy to do. Now we’re gonna come over here. This is one of the things I’ve been doing the last couple of days in preparation for our program. And that is, I’ve been canning. And what I’ve been making is called green tom, sorry, tomato butter. Not green tomatoes, it’s not made with green, but I made it with the red. And this is tomato butter. First of all, you take 12 cups of chopped red tomatoes. You wanna take a tomato, you have to take the skin off and core it. You know how to take the skin off it? You have a pan of boiling water. You submerge the tomato, make a little slit in the bottom of it, a little cross-slit, submerge it for 10 seconds in boiling water, bring it out, plunge it into ice water, and the skin will come right off. And you core it, chop it up like I’ve done here. This is 12 cups. To this, we’re going to add, now stick with me here, because this is such a delicacy, you eat it on bagels, you can eat it with cream cheese on bagels, you can put it as a side dish for crackers, you can put it on spreads, there’s no limit to it. It’s just a good tasting, excellent tasting side dish. I’m gonna take two whole cinnamon sticks. Just stick them down in those tomatoes. And two whole lemons. This is lemon rind and all, we just chopped the whole, we took the seeds out, but we chopped everything else and put that in with the tomatoes. All right, now what you’re going to add is five cups of sugar. You say, you’re not going to get that in there, Arlene. I think I am. We’ve made it in this size pan. This is just a Dutch oven size. Because once the water starts to cook out of these tomatoes it will begin to reduce. And what you do is cook this over high heat to get it started, and then you’re gonna reduce it. Because this will burn easily. You have to stir it really pretty often, just to make sure it’s not sticking. If you have a nonstick pan, by all means, this is the time to use it. You cook this about two hours, until it gets to this consistency. Do you see that? Let me get you another spoon, look at that. Isn’t that wonderful? And what we’re gonna do now is can this. And the way you can this is, you have to take canning jars. And you must sterilize them. I cannot specify how important it is to have clean jars, clean utensils, clean lids that have never been used before. There’s nothing worse, and I’ve learned it the hard way, than preparing things, and you know what happens, you go to pick them off the pantry shelf in about a month, and you have, it’s spoiled and there’s mold and fungus all over the top, whatever it is. It’s so disappointing because you’ve put all that work into it and it’s just because maybe you didn’t sterilize everything and there was some kind of a bug or something, you know, I don’t know, bacteria formed. You want to be meticulous, I can’t stress that enough to you. All right, so this particular recipe, you can see it, it smells so good, when you’re cooking this, you think, oh my goodness. You’re gonna take out your cinnamon sticks. Let me go ahead and retrieve those out of here because you would not want that to be put into a jar. Now, well, if I could hold on to it, I would. All right, here we go. I’ll just put that back. Let me find the other one, now. You wanna take that out first before you start to can it. This mixture that you’re gonna be putting into your jars has got to be hot and boiling. You can’t say, oh, it’s getting too thick, and I’ll shut it off. Hot, it has to go into it hot, because you’re not gonna do a water bath, okay? So first of all, you take your jar like this and you submerge it into boiling water. And what I do is, I put my lid and my ring together. Now let me see if I can find that ring that I said nobody should ever use because there’s a gigantic dent in it. Now, this came out of the brand new box. You can see, it’s got a dent here and it’s got a dent here. It will never seal, it will not seal. You discard it, don’t even try to use it. All right, and then I’m going to put my lid, already assembled, down into the water. You also, the first time that you’re starting this, you must sterilize this. So I put my funnel down into the water. And also my dipper that I’m going to be using. Put that into the water. They have to be sterilized. Now, I’m gonna bring out my jar. Very carefully, like this, you don’t touch it. Put it there, and you’re gonna put your funnel right on top. Then the dipper that I have already sterilized. I’m going to bring that up, and you don’t want anything to touch the rim of the jar because you will not get a seal. And you fill it to about, I’d say, a fourth to a half inch from the top of the jar. Now, you’re gonna take, let me put this back here so you can see what I’m gonna do. You’re gonna take this off without getting any of that on the top of the jar. Now you’re gonna reach into the boiling water, get your two pieces, the seal and the ring, place it over the jar, just like that. Nothing and nobody’s touched the top, either the rubber part of the ring here, or the top of the jar. Because if you do, you’ll not get a good seal and it will definitely spoil. Next, you take your clean towel, you screw on the lid, you turn it over one time so that that hot mixture goes up and grabs that seal. And you tighten it and you put it out, there’s your jar. We’re gonna do one more. You say, but Arlene, I’m not used to doing, now see, this looks like it has a crack in it. I won’t even think about using that. We’ll get rid of that one. You say, but I don’t like to use those seals and all that. Well, you know what you can do, you can save your jelly jars. But of course, this isn’t going to seal. But what you do is melt paraffin, which is this right here, you can melt this slowly in a pan over your stove. And once you have that in here, you just pour some paraffin over the top, and it will seal it, then you can put a lid on. I personally like to use the seal method better because I just feel more safer. Sometimes people don’t get a good seal on that paraffin and then it gets spoiled. Let’s try it one more time here. Okay, we’ve got our jar nice and hot. This recipe, by the way, came from Naomi Brockman. I believe her name was Brockman. And she said that it’s a hundred-year-old recipe her grandmother used to make. And again, thank you so much, Naomi, I appreciate it. And she calls it tomato butter. And you can, this is a great idea, how about some gifts for Christmas that you can put away now? Do some of this now, you won’t be running around in December saying, oh, what am I gonna give so and so, oh, I had all those tomatoes, I should’ve done something with them. Too late then. Now’s the time to do it. Okay, and again, we take the funnel off, making sure that nothing touches the top of that. We get our lid out and we apply it immediately. You wanna use extreme caution here with the kids because you don’t want anybody getting burnt. And when kids are running around, this is not the time for you to be canning. Wait till they go to bed or something, get your stuff ready. Make sure you turn it over to get the seal. The other thing I wanna tell you is that in the center, there is a little, like a burp mold here. And once this seals, right now it’s sticking up like this, you can see, it’s concave like this. When it seals, you might walk away from there in a few minutes, and you’ll hear a big, like a pop. That means it has sucked in all of the heat and sealed. And if you have any that have totally cooled off and that has not gone down or not sealed, then you know that you have to keep that refrigerated. But don’t push it down with your finger to make it happen. It has to happen naturally. Sometimes I’ve even had to dump the stuff back out, get it good and hot again, because it cooled down by the time I was ready to can it. Things you wanna remember about canning. We’ll be right back with more in just a minute. Stay tuned. All right, this is called quick and easy corn and tomatoes. And this is something you’re gonna prepare, I tried to do things on today’s program that would help you use up the tomatoes that seem to be coming in like an avalanche right now. But this is interesting because we’re gonna start with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. And we’re gonna put that in our skillet. And we’re gonna add, this is a red onion that we finely sliced. We’re just gonna add that in there. That’s a whole, that’s a pretty big onion, but we like lots of onion, right? That really flavors it good. And let me see, get a little heat going here, little better. There we go. All right, now this is gonna saute and we’re gonna add some garlic. Just about a couple of cloves of garlic. If you like more, add more, no problem. One thing I’m always mindful of at this time of the year when all of this produce and stuff comes in is God’s bounty. There’s so much, you know, just think about one year if God just didn’t let the sun shine or if we had so much rain it rained everything out. And we would have very little. You know, we take for granted that the sun will come up every day, the rain will come to nurture the ground. And yet God has provided all of that. And have you ever thought, where would we be if that didn’t happen? Horrible thought, awful to think about. But I’m thankful that he’s very faithful. Now, when we go to the beach, like we did this past summer, and I always get these little pamphlets that say, you know, the tide will come in at a certain time, the tide will go out, God is so consistent they can even publish when the tides are gonna come in and out for a year in advance. Because he’s a faithful, consistent God. Tell you, nobody like him. All right, these are gonna cook, this is supposed to cook for about three minutes, just until, three to five minutes, until it gets soft. But I’m gonna go ahead, and I’m gonna add, this is six large tomatoes. We’ve got those fried, do you wanna come in, Sandy, she’s gonna check on our fried green tomatoes, see how they’re doing in the oven because we have to turn them after 10 minutes. And we wanna do that. Now we have, ah, there we go. Now we’ve just quartered and cut into wedges the ripe, these have to be good and ripe, you don’t wanna use the unripe tomatoes. Let them ripen up until they’re real good. And we’re gonna add some fresh basil. A fourth of a cup of chopped fresh basil. Now, there’s nothing in the world that smells like basil, except for basil. It’s wonderful. You’re gonna let this cook down for about 15 minutes. It’s gonna simmer, because this is all gonna cook down. And then after 15 minutes, we’re gonna stir in the three cups of cooked corn. It’s a good way to use up some corn on the cob you had the night before. And you think, oh, we just can’t eat any more. Slice it off the cob, use it in this the next day. All right, I’m gonna go ahead and put the lid on this and show you something else because this needs to cook a while before we add the corn. There we are. Okay, now, I want to show you a tomato and cheese salad. This is Paul’s all-time favorite. And he always gets a hankering for this in the middle of winter, when you can’t find good, fresh basil. But this is called cheese and tomato salad. We’ve made it on the program before and I’ve had so many people writing, saying how much they enjoyed this salad because it’s very easy. Sliced tomatoes, slices of mozzarella cheese, and you variegate them, a slice of tomato, slice of cheese, slice of tomato, slice of cheese, till you cover your platter. Then you take some onions and you cut them and separate them into rings. Then that way, if someone doesn’t want the tomato, they can pull it out. You take one cup, again, this is probably a little bit more than a cup, of basil leaves. Now, my friends at Jordan’s provided good basil. This is fresh, good, tasty basil. And we’re gonna put that in there. And to that, we’re going to add, I’m gonna add some, well, I’ll measure it, okay. About three tablespoons of red wine vinegar. And just put that in with the basil. That’s three, all right, if you like it stronger, use more. Then, just because we’re in a hurry, I’m gonna use, this is gonna chop this up and dice it. Then we’re gonna put about a half a cup of oil. Just gonna do it in a stream. Because it’s really important that we get this all chewed up, it has to be real fine. You can do this in your food processor if you want to. And just keep working with it. This needs to be chopped up very fine. You’re gonna pour that all over your tomatoes and the cheese and the onion. I tell you what, if you can’t eat it all in one night, put it away, it’s even good the next night. It’s great, you will not want to not make this, especially when all those tomatoes are coming in. It’s great. Now I have to get the lid off this. Excuse me one minute. I have a couple of other, another recipe, that’s for a tomato salsa. If we don’t get time to make it today, I’m gonna include it in the newsletter that you’ll be learning how you can receive in just a few minutes. But it’s a very simple one, and one that your family’s gonna enjoy. You start adding the oil to this very, very slowly. Because what you want is for this to mix very well. And when you pour that on top of that cheese and tomatoes and onions, oh, you have not tasted anything quite like this. Little bit more. I think we have a bit more than a cup. Now, some people would wanna use the dried basil. You know what, I don’t have a taste for dried basil, not when I’m used to eating and using the fresh. It is so good. You’re just gonna enjoy it. And again, like I said, I make this a lot in my food processor at home. It’s very easy to do, so enjoy, okay? Well, I think we’ve got, we’ve gotta add our corn, we’ve got our rice cooked, we’re gonna come back with our final comments about this program. We’ll be back in just a minute.

• [Man] To receive the recipes presented on today’s program, plus many more great recipe ideas, send your best donation and a stamped, self-addressed business-sized envelope to At Home, CTV, Wall, Pennsylvania, 15148-1499. You’ll receive Arlene’s heartwarming newsletter, Enjoy! featuring an entire month of At Home recipes, including today’s mouth-watering dishes. Be sure to include the Enjoy! issue number with your request.
• Before we show you the completed, all the dishes that we made today, I’m gonna put this salsa together. Couple of cups of tomatoes, chop them up fine, little bit of red onion, chop it up fine, really, just throw all this together in the bowl, and then you enjoy it. Little bit of brown sugar, couple of tablespoons of brown sugar. Here are some chopped up chilies. You can either use that or the jalapenos, whichever you prefer. Here’s some raisins, about a half cup raisins, and a couple of cups, I think it’s two sweet, two sweet apples, now that I remember. And the juice of a lemon. Just, and it’s probably to keep, make sure that the apples don’t brown. And a little bit of cinnamon. Gonna put that over the top. Mix that up together. And what you do is, you serve this with flour tortilla chips. Or corn tortilla chips, whatever. But isn’t that a nice, beautiful colored salsa? And what a difference of putting apples with tomatoes. Something different, isn’t it? Well, let’s take a look at everything we’ve prepared today. This is our yummy cheese and tomato and fresh basil dressing salad. Telling you, Paul loves this and you’re gonna love it. Here’s our tomato and corn skillet dinner because you put it over a bed of rice. You see how that has just cooked down, the tomatoes are falling apart, good basil in that too, and I just did a sprinkling of cheese. You could even actually grate some cheese in that, like maybe a Swiss or a provolone or something like that, if you wanted to. There’s the tomato butter, you can see it down there, that you would put on a bagel with a little bit of cream cheese, and dip some of that good tomato butter, oh my. And here are the onion fried green tomatoes. Now, I tell you, make sure you put oil on your cookie sheet because that’s what fries them up. I wanna thank Jim and Sandy Mills for some of the tomatoes. And of course, our great friends at Jordan’s because they always give us the best produce. So be sure to join us the next time because it just wouldn’t be the same without you here At Home. We’ll see you then, bye-bye.
• [Man] Fresh produce provided by Jordan Banana, wholesalers of fresh fruit and vegetables, in Dravosburg, Pennsylvania. Appliances provided by Dacor Distinctive Appliances, a reflection of your good taste. Groceries provided by Foodland, where the answer is always yes. Cornerstone Television wishes to thank all our faithful viewers whose consistent prayers and financial support have made this program possible.