My mom is a really picky eater.  It’s infuriating sometimes how picky she is.  There are so many foods she simply doesn’t like or only prefers to eat them the way she makes them.  (That’s not to say she has no ground to stand on in that last statement….my mom is a great cook.)

All my life, my mom has gushed over her grandmother’s Creamed Tomatoes and how much she loved them.  I had the pleasure of eating the dish once, but I always found it amusing to hear my mother go on and on about a food because that’s just not like her.  Unfortunately, the bearer of that recipe has passed away, and presumably, the recipe has gone with her.  I thought it would be a nice birthday present for my mom to make her a big steaming pot of Creamed Tomatoes since I know she hasn’t had any in literally decades.  I turned to the internet.

I was surprised at the limited number of recipes I saw.  Creamed Tomatoes (also known as Tomato Gravy) is something that most people that I grew up around are familiar with.  It’s one of those great Depression Era recipes that can feed a lot of people for super cheap.  Yet, the internet is decidedly barren with recipes for this dish.  A lot of the recipes that I was able to find were heirloom recipes passed down through the generations, but they are all so different that it has made me nervous about trying the recipes.

However, last night I tried the first recipe on my list.  It comes from a place called CDKitchen and the recipe can be found here.

It’s not a long process to make this dish.  I used canned tomatoes as the recipe instructs and aside from the homemade biscuits that I had made earlier, this dish was ready in no more than 15 minutes.  (If you want to use fresh tomatoes, no problem!  Just seed and peel the tomatoes, cut  them up and stew them in a very small amount of water and salt for 15 minutes before beginning the actual recipe.)

The most common way (or so I’m told) to serve this dish is over homemade biscuits.  Just like a gravy.  It’s pretty good that way, actually and is a great one-dish meal for hot days.

This dish was velvet-y and creamy.  The texture was amazing.  However, I was a little disappointed in the lack of dairy or cream in this dish.  The creaminess in this particular recipe came from a very strong slurry of milk and flour..so much flour in fact that the dish tasted faintly of raw flour.  It smelled amazing, though and was really quite good.  I think if I could work a little with it, it would be a fantastic dish.

I’m hoping to find a dish that has a lot of actual cream in it and not so much thickener.  However, the downside to that request is that if one is not careful, the acidity of the tomatoes can cause the dairy to break apart and you end up with a dish that either tastes like vomit or has those tiny dairy pearls in it that are entirely unappetizing.

I will create a post for every recipe I try.  I will then make a more detailed post of the one I choose to make for my mother with more pictures and more hints on getting that perfect creamy texture, because that can be tricky with acidic ingredients like tomatoes.

Until then, this is a perfectly good recipe and I encourage you to give it a try.  When autumn comes and starts to cool things off, this would be a fantastic quick dinner.  Enjoy!