I look forward to tomato season all year long. In February and March, to distract myself from the long gray winter, I start seedlings in my basement. When the tomatoes finally ripen in summer, I can’t get enough of them. And every year around this time, I discover that I planted more tomatoes than two people could possibly hope to eat.

This year, the overabundance problem arrived a little earlier than usual in the form of sungold cherry tomatoes. I normally skip planting cherry tomatoes, preferring to save my garden space for sauce and Brandywine varieties, but this year I decided to add a few cherry tomato plants to the mix. Sungolds are a super-sweet, almost citrusy tasting, bright orange variety. They ripen in pretty orange-to-green rainbow clusters on the vines—and if my plants are any indication, they yield a ridiculous quantity.

With several pounds of sungold cherry tomatoes sitting on my counter and no end in sight to the ripening fruits still on my plants, I’ve been looking for as many different ways to use them as possible. Truth be told, I’m beginning to get a little sick of them—they’re a little too cloyingly sweet for my taste, lacking the complexity of their larger counterparts, and I can only eat so many caprese salads.

I also have a plethora of peaches, so I looked for a way to combine the two. I happened on a recipe for a cherry tomato peach salsa and decided to give it a shot, but I had my doubts. Since the sungolds are so sweet to begin with, I worried that adding peaches to the mix would make the flavor sugary and one-dimensional.

Happily, I was wrong. The lemon juice in the recipe tempers the sweetness of both the tomatoes and peaches just enough while still allowing the fresh, bright flavors to shine, and the jalapeños add just the right amount of kick. The original recipe called for leaving the cherry tomatoes in quarters for a very chunky salsa, but I wanted a slightly finer texture, so I pulsed the mixture briefly in a food processor after combining all the ingredients.

This is a salsa that’s equally at home on a tortilla chip as it is accenting a piece of grilled chicken or fish. Enjoy!

Cherry Tomato Peach Salsa

Slightly adapted from myrecipes.com

Ingredients:

2 cups peeled, chopped fresh peaches

1 1/2 cups quartered cherry tomatoes

1-2 thinly sliced jalapeño or serrano peppers, to taste

1/2 cup loosely packed fresh basil leaves, sliced

1/4 cup chopped fresh mint leaves

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon honey (optional; omit if your cherry tomatoes are very sweet)

Salt to taste

Combine all ingredients except salt and honey in a medium bowl; toss to combine. Taste and add honey, if desired, and salt to taste. Transfer the mixture to a food processor and pulse a few times to chop the ingredients to your desired texture.

Serve with tortilla chips, or use as a topping for grilled meat, chicken, or seafood.

Emily Scace, an editor, enjoys discovering new recipes and perfecting old ones in her East Lyme kitchen. She cooks with local ingredients, including whatever is growing in her garden. She can be reached at savoringseasons@gmail.com.