Bushels of tomatoes ready to be made into tomato soup (Image: danspapers.com)
It was one of those cold afternoons in early winter when it gets dark early. Six p.m. and already
Jacquelyn Ottman’s book, If Trash Could Talk, inspires a new consumption culture in NYC.
pitch black. The produce seller who stakes out the corner of 68th Street and First Avenue was just finishing up for the day as I was walking past on my way home. He had a bunch of near rotten tomatoes he was trying to unload.
Soft as pillows, clearly about to burst, his tomatoes clearly wouldn’t last another day. (Truth be told, they were so old, he probably shouldn’t have been selling them at all.) He offered me the lot — a whole bag’s worth — for a $1. I couldn’t resist. Surely there would be something I could do with these tomatoes so they wouldn’t go to waste.
Once Home, I Flipped Open My Fanny Farmer Cookbook in Search of a Recipe for Tomato Soup
(My mother gave it to me over 30 years ago when I moved into my first apartment.) Surely enough, on p. 58 I found a recipe for cream of tomato soup. Luckily, I just happen to have a small amount of heavy cream left over from a less extemporaneous recipe. I immediately whipped up a batch, in anticipation of what I expected to be a great bowl of tomato soup.
Ask me how resourceful I felt! Ask me how satisfying that soup tasted going down!
When was the last time you made tomato soup — or any other kind of soup made from overripe produce?
Rescued some food before it went to waste? Please tell all.
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Hi Jacquie – sounds yummy! Would you be willing to share the recipe? I usually make sauce when I have lots of tomatoes but I think soup would be a nice change.
Sure, Ilene. My recipe’s right out of my trusty Fanny Farmer cookbook, but here’s a recipe from Rachel Ray that’s quite similar. Needs a little onion, some carrots (for natural sweetness) and of course chicken broth.
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/cream-of-fresh-tomato-soup-recipe/index.html
Let me know what you think!
My mother is a school teacher with a 12 year old son, and often things get lost in her refrigerator or forgotten until it’s far too late. I came home for a visit this week and found nearly three pounds of forgotten carrots in the hydrator drawer, starting to look dry and crinkly – far from the fresh, crisp carrots you would like to snack on.
Determined not to let them go to waste, I took the carrots on from all angles. First, a shredded carrot salad; the crunch doesn’t matter quite so much once they’ve been shredded and dressed with a fresh vinaigrette.
Next was a carrot soup. Much like Jacquie, I find that soups are the best way to save your produce that has seen better days. Using ingredients already in the fridge, I made a simple, fresh, carrot-ginger soup. With only 5 ingredients, it was an easy, quick dinner. Served next to a fresh radicchio salad with fresh baked bread, you would never know that you were eating carrots that were past their prime.
Saving food is the ultimate satisfaction. Good for the world and good for your wallet.
Hi Jacquie,
As someone who has never been a fan of the leftovers I’ve also tried to find a way to reinvent last nights meatloaf into tonight’s flavorful feast. When I was little, leftovers were almost never a problem at my house. My mother had perfected the art of cooking just enough for everyone to get one serving. Although it was very efficient cooking on her part it did leave some still grumbling stomachs at the end of a number of meals. When I got to college though I soon learned that I had no idea how to cook a single portion meal and found my fridge overflowing with leftovers. This usually resulted in lots of waste and of course the occasional archeological refrigerator discovery of long lost dishes from weeks long ago. Then one day while at the campus bookstore I came across my savior, a leftover cookbook. I soon had an arsenal of recipes to use and last nights leftover chicken became today’s three-bean chili. It’s very satisfying to cook efficiently and I’ll have to add your cream of tomato soup recipe to my list of recipes too!
Smoothies are the hero when we want to rescue our almost spoiled fruit, just as soup is for vegetables. Either make it now or stick the ripe fruit in the freezer (peeled, washed) for a later, cooler smoothie. We like to also save our veggie scraps (e.g. broccoli stems, carrot tops) to make a vegetable broth to use in those soups. (We haven’t perfected this yet…our last broth was overwhelmingly cilantro-ey, but I’m sure future batches will be better!) Making your own roasted peppers is another great way to save peppers (I follow Ina Garten’s recipe: http://bit.ly/YILJDL).
Stale cereal and crackers can be baked in the oven at a low temperature to get back its crispiness.
We have also used certain ingredients as egg-substitutes, like tofu, prunes and bananas, to make delicious desserts.
But once we reused everything we can, we compost all the rest of the organic waste. In NYC, we are lucky to live by a farmer’s market that accepts food waste and the YMCA near us also started accepting it. But its easy to make your own compost if you have a place to do so.
When you hear the average American wastes 500 pounds of food a year, you know its so important environmentally and socially to help create a shift. Towards that end, every bit counts!
Hi Jacquie!
I can certainly relate to that satisfaction of saving some tasty food from the trash can – and I swear it makes it the meal taste even better! As an executive board member of my university’s community garden, I spend a lot of time growing food for myself and my fellow gardeners. Summer is our prime harvesting time, and due a month of studying abroad, I missed the garden’s ripest tomatoes, one of my favorite veggies! (Luckily I got to enjoy the ones my father grew in our garden at home… caprese salad anyone?)
When I got back to school I found a lot of pale red and green tomatoes still on the vine. For the next two months I was harvesting tomatoes in the garden which had never reached their prime; it’s a wonderful benefit to growing heirloom tomatoes – they don’t ripen like clockwork! I’m not sure where I learned the trick but I knew to plop those babies on the window sill and let sun and time do their work. I was enjoying personally grown, organic and local tomatoes until the end of October. I had such an abundance that I was able to share the tasty veggies with the other gardeners who hadn’t realized the tomatoes were edible at this point in the season. Once it had gotten really cold, I went into the garden with a couple of group members and we harvested all the remaining summer veggies we could and made a feast out of them: pesto pasta from our basil, a salad with our heirloom baby tomatoes, sliced tomato with sauteed eggplant and mozzarella. We had a fantastic time enjoying the food we had grown together and even though we all compost any organic material, it’s even more satisfying to eat the food. Dining is done best as a communal event and I regularly invite friends over to share in a meal that we create from our combined leftovers. To need to waste when we can enjoy with a little creativity!
I discovered my favorite soup recipe (carrot soup with curry) when looking for a way to use up old carrots. Bread pudding, French toast, or home-made bread crumbs work great for stale bread. Cook no-longer-crisp apple slices in a little bit of butter, brown sugar and cinnamon for an ice cream topping (or eat plain!)
Love this! I have two tomato plants in my garden and when I came back from a two week long vacation this summer I found them positively engulfed with so many tomatoes my family didn’t know what to do with them all.
This would be perfect to pair with a grilled cheese – one of my favorite and easiest meals. Grilled cheeses are also awesome because you can really put anything in them! From mac and cheese to broccoli to roast beef, this article shows just how creative you can get with a grilled cheese – http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/articles/50-grilled-cheese.page-1.html – it would be great for using leftovers!
Lindsey, I’ve heard that black/ ripe bananas are the sweetest of all! I would suspect this is true of tomatoes too. Certainly every super ripe tomato I made into soup or pasta sauce tasted ‘sweet’ in so many ways 🙂
I love this idea of a sweet tomato sauce, no pun intended. I will try this idea soon. I recently recycled my overripe tomatoes into a pasta dish which blew my mind. Along with some other natural ingredients and any variation of pasta, a great dish will be produced. The great thing about cooking with mostly organics such as vegetables and fruits is when cooked right it can really enhance a dish in a very unexpected way; while also preventing waste.