Tomato Attack

We decided to plant a garden this year, our first in the new house. Steve built us a raised bed, filled it with good soil, and we had eggplant, squash, zucchini, peppers, cucumbers, and four different kinds of tomatoes all planted and ready to go sometime in the second week of April, which is when the gardening people told us we should plant...

...and then Atlanta got hit with a random freeze in the middle of April. That doesn't really happen here. Unless I'm trying to plant something, apparently. It seems my black thumb is impressive enough to change entire weather patterns.

Go figure.

After the freeze, we thought we'd lost everything, but most of the plants seemed to rebound after a few days except for a couple of them that Steve replaced at Home Depot a few weeks later. Well, we thought he'd replaced the same plants, but I'm not entirely sure that's the case now. Because we have tomatoes. Lots and lots and LOTS of tomatoes. The tomatoes killed off the zucchini. They killed off the squash. They killed off the eggplant. They tried to kill off the peppers, but we replanted those in a different location before it was too late. The only thing that was able to stand up against the onslaught of the tomato plant were the cucumbers. I honestly don't know how we ended up with so many tomato plants. We HAD to have replaced some non-tomato frozen plants with new tomato-tomato plants, on top of whatever had survived the freeze.

BECAUSE WE HAVE HAD ALL OF THE TOMATOES AT OUR HOUSE THIS SUMMER.

All of them.

My neighbor got the first batch while we were out of town at the end of June, and it wasn't a bad haul. I was jealous that she had such a nice harvest, in fact, because I wasn't sure how many of those we had ahead of us...

Then, less than a week later, all hell had broken loose...

And they've kept coming. And coming. And coming. I have picked at least this much, each week, every week, for the last month. That is A LOT of tomatoes and cucumbers.

Here is what I'm currently trying to work through:

I don't think I am EVER going to recover from the amount of acid I've consumed this summer.

A few of my favorite tomato uses, after a month of research and development:
Quinoa Salad with Tomatoes and Cucumbers
Baked Chicken with Tomatoes and Lemon
Garden Tomato and Basil Pesto Pizza
Marcella Hazan's Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter (I've tasted this alone, but not with pasta yet, as we've canned this recipe for the winter. I haven't eaten a single roma tomato, just because they're a good canning tomato and I've had more than enough grape and cherry tomatoes to keep me well supplied this past month,)

I'm hoping we manage to plan a little better next year, because this is just getting ridiculous, now...