I don’t remember a year where our tomato season has lasted so long.  It’s mid October, and we’re still getting tomatoes!

I stopped by our favorite local tomato supplier, a family that just has a great garden and sells their tomatoes out of their barn.  There were tons of Roma tomatoes, so I loaded up a bag of them, along with some other tomatoes for sandwiches, etc.  I’d been thinking of drying some tomatoes in the oven by roasting them, but realized that was just silly.  I had to smoke them!

I just cleaned them and cut them in half, laying them out on a baking sheet on parchment paper.  I drizzled olive oil on the tomato halves, and put the baking sheet on the Big Green Egg at about 225 degrees F.

I didn’t really want them dried out, so I smoked them for about 1 1/2 hours, just to soften them and get some good smokiness in them.

My wife and I both tried a tomato half, and we found that they’re too smoky on their own.  However, they’ll make a great ingredient in other things.  To try this out, I grilled some burgers and bacon on the BGE and sauteed some onion in balsamic vinegar.

I took some mayo and added a chopped up tomato half.  Man o’ man, was this good stuff!

It’s going to be interesting finding how to use these tomatoes.  I’m going to portion them out and vacuum pack them to put in the freezer, then I can use them whenever I want.

Any ideas on using smoked tomatoes?

I’ve not been cooking a whole lot lately, as I’ve been very frugal.  I’ve been looking for new work and just trying to cut back until something comes through that I think is a good fit.  Coupled with that, my new venture into the Adopt-a-Blogger program by Kristen has me thinking sandwiches, thanks to my adoptee, Kathy at Panini Happy.

In the meantime, we had remnants of Hurricane Ike come through Ohio, as I stated before.  What that meant to us was that we were without power or water for just over a week.  Staying at the home of friends, I called our house at midnight last night, and our answering machine picked up, so we got power sometime between 8 pm and midnight.  We went right home to make sure everything was good, and to enjoy the night in our own bed, with our cats and electricity and water and all that stuff.  The lasting result of the storm for us is that loss of our favorite oak tree, which will be sorely missed, but it could have been so much worse, and is still worse for many.  My prayers go out even more to the people in Texas that are still dealing with the aftermath of the full hurricane.

Anyway, the switch to trying to be a bit more stingy in my food buying had me voluntarily eating peanut butter and jam sandwiches for lunch.  As this happened, someone on the BBQ Brethren forum asked for pb&j variations to try… Something none ‘que but still good.  I did a couple of variations, then continued that with some other sandwiches, and I thought I’d share the stuff I came up with.

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