Fifty quarts of summer

It’s the moment we’ve been waiting for all year. The kitchen windowsill is stacked three-deep with ripe tomatoes – red, yellow, purple, orange – and my basket’s loaded with more. All that late-winter seed catalog fantasizing has come true and (hallelujah!) we have too many for us to eat.

But tomato season is short, and the year is long. We have a fleeting window to turn this superabundance into the pantry staple we’ll be eating long after the garden has been leveled by frost. Now’s the time to make stewed tomatoes, quarts upon quarts of them, that we’ll use for pasta sauce and soups, on top of pizza and under shakshuka.

We don’t do it “right,” though maybe we will do some legit canning later on, when the garden sprint slows down, so that we can store some of this good stuff outside the freezer. But right now, it’s hot and there’s no call to turn on the stovetop. This is husband Joe’s tried-and-true signature solar tomato method™, using no fuel but the power of the sun. To be clear, I’m mostly the grower and husband Joe is mostly the cook, so my job ends when I put my basket down on the kitchen counter. (I did try making ketchup one year, but since the kids prefer Heinz it seemed like my time could be better spent doing literally anything else.)

We use whatever tomatoes we’ve got – not just sauce tomatoes, though we use those too when we’ve got them. Joe chops them all up and puts the pieces in the large, covered bowl of our solar cooker, arranging the foil sunshield outside on the deck to face the morning sun. He’ll rotate the sun shield a few times over the course of the day, following the sun’s path. By sundown, the tomatoes will have cooked down into a lumpy liquid that we store in quart jars in the freezer. One full solar cooker yields five quarts.

What’s a solar cooker, you ask? It’s a simple contraption, bestowed upon us by my late mom’s partner, that concentrates sunlight to generate high temperatures that will eventually cook whatever you put in the black bowl in the middle. Ours doesn’t seem to be on the market, but they come in various designs. Why everyone doesn’t own one remains a mystery to me.

“It’s a sun-worshipping exercise,” says Joe, standing at the kitchen counter chopping. “The sun grows the tomatoes. The sun stews the tomatoes. The sun stores the tomatoes.”

“Stores them?” I am skeptical. “The freezer stores them.”

“Now that we have solar panels, it’s the sun,” he says, “that powers the freezer.” I see his point.

Joe’s goal for the summer is to put up 50 quarts of stewed tomatoes. So far, this season is looking good; we’re at 40 quarts as of early September. He likes to have a lot on-hand because we’re hella cheap and vaguely snobby and prefer not to be buying Prego. But also, sometimes Joe brings a jar of stewed tomatoes and perhaps a dozen eggs to a particular friend, which for awhile struck me as slightly embarrassing. Most of the time (I’ve tried to gently suggest) gifts are of a finished nature – something more like baked goods in a cute container, a six-pack of craft beer or a bouquet of flowers than like a dead chicken (we’ve also brought that for a friend).

But certain people, it turns out, truly appreciate a Mason jar of stewed tomatoes. These are the folks who know their way around the kitchen, I’ve noticed. They get it: that the orange-red glow emanating from that jar is summer incarnate, the cumulative fruit of Joe and my six-month tag-team, from seedlings started in the sunroom in April to garden beds prepped in May to plants weeded and watered until summer’s end when, finally, it was time. Time for Joe’s Solar Method™. So if you get a jar of stewed tomatoes in your stocking, well, it’s a compliment.