You Say Tomato.....

Tomatoes have to be one of the most versatile vegetables that can be grown in a garden.  Pulled off the vine while green, you can have yourself a green tomato salad or fried green tomatoes.  Once ripe, they can be eaten raw, sliced and used to transform a bacon and lettuce salad into something amazing, they can be tossed into stews, cooked down into sauces, made into ketchup, dried, canned, or juiced....and that juice can even be added to a little vodka to make the perfect Bloody Mary. There really is no end to the uses of a tomato.

Late August and all of September brings a bounty of tomatoes.  The small seeds that I dropped into the dirt sometime in late February are now well over 7 feet tall and produce, on average, between 60 and  80 pounds of red vine-ripened tomatoes every week.  Imagine for a minute just how many tomatoes that really is....that is 2 big bushel baskets filled to heaping and then another half of one spread out in a kitchen or on the front porch awaiting processing.  This particular week, it was well over 120 pounds to process.

I remember a point in time, when I was living in LaCrosse, oblivious to farm life and all that goes with it, and I heard an episode of Prairie Home Companion where Garrison Keillor was talking about all the tomatoes in the house in August and every horizontal surface being completely covered with them.  I remember thinking, why would anyone have that many tomatoes?  What can you possibly do with that many tomatoes?  I can honestly say....it happens.  Everywhere you look in my house on the days after picking, there are tomatoes - sorted by level of "doneness" so that the ones that are softest and least likely to survive the next few days intact are used up first.

 My Friday nights lately, instead of being reserved for a date with my husband, are all about picking tomatoes.  I walk out to the tomato patch with a bushel basket in one hand and every time I think, 'oh, there will only be a few more tonight.'  I start with the plant that is off on its own because the tomatoes on that one are the easier to see and get to, and when I suddenly realize that just this one plant has already given me 10 pounds of tomatoes and I still have 22 more plants to go, the sense of panic sets in.  I usually spend the next hour bushwhacking my way through tomato plants that reach well above my head and are the home to many helpful (although frightening) creatures. It is a little like gardening with Audrey II from the Little Shop of Horrors.  Tomato plants don't always carry their wonderful fruits on the outside of the plant, so in many cases I am reaching blindly into an overgrown tomato cage in search of the glimmer of red that I can see from the outside - often I am rewarded with a beautiful round, smooth tomato and at other times, I find my fingers sinking into the rotten mush of a tomato that has succumbed to the worst of all tomato deaths in which their insides liquefy and are held deceptively to the vine by the skin alone.  There are those tomatoes that are on the edge of being too far gone to deal with - these are set aside in a separate pile for the pigs (and if you ever need to make a pig really happy....rotten tomatoes is the way to do it.)

As one bushel basket fills to over flowing, I start setting out small piles of tomatoes at the edges of the tomato jungle to be picked up with the second and third baskets that I usually send a kid to fetch.  I consider my weight lifting workout for the night to be carrying all the heavy baskets, one at a time, back to the house where I heave a sigh, take a shower to wash off all the iridescent green "tomato dust" and go to bed, because dealing with all those tomatoes suddenly becomes an extremely daunting task that can only be tackled after a full night's sleep.

The next day, the tomato take down starts.  30 pounds are washed, cored and pureed for marinara.  Combined with onions, basil, oregano, thyme, honey, garlic powder, and various other spices, they are boiled down from roughly ten quarts to six over the course of roughly 5 hours and then placed in glass jars that have been sterilized in boiling water for 10 minutes. When the jars are filled and lids are in place, the marinara is canned in boiling water for 35 minutes.  There is a lot of boiling going on every Saturday night at my house in the fall.  The temperatures have come down a little from mid summer, but in my kitchen, the heat and humidity are incredible.

So, that is 30 pounds  down....50 or so pounds to go.....

I grow the Amish paste tomatoes.  So named because they tend to have more "meat" to them and less juice so they are good for turning into sauces and paste.  I have tried a few recipes for making paste, but finally this year struck upon one that is not only easy, but actually doesn't take three days to cook down.  12 pounds of tomatoes with bad spots cut out - boiled slightly, run through a food mill to remove skins and seeds and then boiled down with a little olive oil added.  After it has been reduced by about 1/2 (from roughly 8 quarts to 4) it is poured it onto a shallow jelly roll pan (or two) and baked in the oven at 350 for about two or three hours.  Then we reduce the heat to 250 degrees and stir it until we can form it into a mountain in the center of the pan and it more or less holds its shape.  This tomato paste will fill 2 and 1/2 jelly jars (2.5 cups). Twelve pounds of tomatoes down to roughly 20 ounces.  This is 20 ounces of the most concentrated tomato taste you can imagine.  I happened to take a little finger full for a taste and the taste buds on my tongue could only register "tomato" for the next two hours.  I would can it for future use, but its use is so immediate that it isn't worth canning it - it lives in the refrigerator overnight and then it gets used for pizza sauce.

50 pounds minus 12 pounds.....now I am down to 38 pounds left to deal with....

Pizza, like spaghetti, is made and eaten once a week at this house so you can imagine how much tomato sauce we can crank through in a year.  This year's pizza sauce is also a new recipe.  Last year, I made some sauce and froze it to be used throughout the winter, but since freezer space is at such a premium, I had to come up with some way to put this in a jar and keep it.  The one problem I have with new recipes is the, "what if it is really terrible" problem.  It can happen - you make a huge batch of something and it turns out tasting terrible, but it is really hard to just throw all that good produce out and start again. It requires some amount of taking a risk.  I also worry about the, "is this stuff really safe to can?" problems that are inherent with canning tomatoes - the pH of them has to be low enough to prevent unsafe bacteria from flourishing.  To most of my tomatoes that are canned, I add citric acid to help ensure that the pH is low enough and then, the best test that I have found to determine if it is good or not, is to smell it.  If the seal is good and if it smells like fresh tomatoes when you open the lid, then it is likely just fine, if it doesn't smell right, then toss it out.  The pizza sauce, besides using up another 12 pounds of tomatoes, has numerous other herbs and spices than the spaghetti sauce (which is good, because it takes me a week to pick and dry enough basil to use in the marinara recipe), but it too has to sit on the stove for hours on end to reduce down to a sauce consistency, and then be placed in boiled jars and then boiled again to seal.

38 pounds minus 12 pounds ....26 more pounds to go...

These remaining tomatoes, if I have any energy left in me, are blanched, skinned, cut up and frozen for making chili in the winter months.  When the freezer is full and we have enough marinara and pizza sauce to last all year, the tomato processing goes into phase two....

Phase two is salsa and ketchup - these are largely up to my husband, because by this time of the season, I have seen so many tomatoes that the mere thought of blanching or skinning one more tomato can almost make me cry.

I am very torn, sometimes, about how much fuel it takes for all this cooking to take place.  How much energy am I using to process this bounty into a form that can be used all year round?  But, when I take into consideration that all the tomatoes come from my garden....organic/vine-ripened tomatoes that, on average, cost about $1.25/pound (that's roughly $100/week)...not to mention the cost of the herbs and onions that I grow myself, and each time I make a batch, I am getting roughly 12 meals for my family without having to drive a car to a store to purchase and they will not require refrigeration to store - the math usually works out in my favor.  The one thing that doesn't get taken into consideration is my time spent blanching, peeling, cutting, chopping, mixing, cooking, and canning.  This gets to be quite a considerable chunk of time in which nothing else gets done around the house or gardens.  I have been so distracted with tomatoes at various times that I have completely missed the harvest of other vegetables in the garden - even as I am writing this I am reminded of the carrots that have been left in the ground so long that they have now reached the mammoth proportions of being as long as my forearm and as thick around as well.  The last carrot that I pulled from the ground was used for carrot sticks in my girls' lunches for a week, made an entire carrot cake (that takes 3 cups of grated carrot) and was used in tomato soup - there are about 45 such carrots still out there in the garden, and I don't dare even stop to think about the beans.  Thank goodness those are two crops that can wait a bit to be harvested. Tomatoes are no where near so patient.  When a tomato is ripe, it needs to be eaten or processed within a few days.

There is definitely something to be said about a vine ripened tomato.  Most of the tomatoes that are found in the grocery stores were picked when they were green.  They were held in controlled environmental conditions until they were shipped, then they were exposed to ethylene so they will ripen and, due to consumer pressure to have only perfectly red tomatoes, the genes of the commercial tomato have been selected so that they will be a lovely, uniform, red color, but lack in taste.  The thing that makes a tomato taste so good are the sugars that develop as it ripens naturally.  It is a trade off - good looking/no taste or unevenly red and blotchy/great taste.   Those green-shouldered tomatoes that they sell at the farmer's markets - those are the good ones.  Give them two days in a sunny window to fully ripen and then you will have an amazing tomato.  The other thing to consider, if you are looking for organic tomatoes, is that they don't always look perfect.  They have cracks in the skin, they have scabs on the tops by the stem, they will have areas where a grass hopper took a meal out of one side....in other words, they aren't always pretty, but this is only skin deep.  As the tomato adage goes,  beauty is only skin deep, but tastelessness goes all the way to the bone.

So, the next time you see someone by the side of the road selling bushels of tomatoes, consider stopping and buying 20 or 30 pounds from them, then break out the recipe books, or look online for ideas to transform them into whatever favorite red sauce you can imagine, but be forewarned....you may become one of those crazy people that finds themselves with tomatoes on every horizontal surface of your kitchen ....it's been known to happen.