Going Green

The Greenhouse is almost finished. I should qualify that statement just a bit. What this actually means is that it is as finished as it is likely going to get.  We have a long list of projects that are "almost finished" but will not be "completely finished" until such time as a "for sale" sign goes up in the front yard. (This actually happened in the third house we owned....brand new completely finished bathroom, used once on the final day that we moved out of the house).  As such, in its almost finished state, the green house is one of my new favorite places to hang out - I sneak down there when the kids are driving me crazy and hang out in bright sun and warm temperatures.  It is like a small trip to the Bahamas when the weather turns chilly. 

Currently, I don't have much growing, because I am slowly experimenting to see what crops might like living in this semi-controlled, tundra-to-tropics climate the best.  I say semi-controlled because the temperature fluctuates wildly from 34 degrees to 120 degrees sometimes on a daily basis....this is not to every plant's liking.  So far, however, the tomato plants seen to have taken to it well as they have sprouted and started adding leaves....just what I need....more tomatoes.

There is a fan to be installed soon to help reduce the extreme heat and currently there is a kerosene heater that keeps it from freezing, but it may be a challenge to fully heat that big building when the weather really gets serious about being cold.  If I can get the lettuce that has recently sprouted to grow until Christmas and then start spring plantings in there in February, it will have been a great success for the first year.

 

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.

The Not-So-Secret, Secret Family Sauce

Tomatoes......they are everywhere this time of year.  This year, for whatever reason, it seems to be taking them an inordinately long amount of time to ripen on the vine....but then perhaps they are all about building tension and suspense.  They are walking a fine line between ripening and being killed each night by frost and I refuse to play their game and cover them....at least for now while the temperatures still linger in the forties at night.  But we rely too heavily on them to not get the full harvest from these beauties.  Two years ago, I planted 10 Amish Paste tomato plants, then last year I planted 13, now this year I have planted 18 and they are killing me with this ripening suspense.  The usual routine is to go out with a bushel basket every 3 days and pick somewhere between 30 and 40 pounds of them at a time to process into the most wonderful marinara imaginable.  This year....my twice weekly trips to harvest have only been yielding about 20 pounds, but they are still given center stage for the day as they are processed and slowly cooked down and canned.

The recipe, although spectacular, is not one I developed.  I fell in love with it while reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle  by Barbara Kingsolver.  I had often wondered how to prepare and can tomatoes - they are one of those somewhat frightening vegetables, in my book, that can potentially lead to botulism and sending the entire family to the hospital if not canned properly, but when given a straight forward recipe and easy to follow guidelines, it has quickly become a staple at our house. 

Initially, I bought all the spices it required and then realized very quickly that most of them I can grow myself.  With a little planning and drying, now everything that goes into this sauce is grown on my farm except for the black pepper, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and lemon peel. 

Tomatoes that are grown and ripen on the vine are spectacular.  I am not a huge fan of eating raw tomatoes....it is a texture thing, but heirloom tomatoes, home grown and still warm from the sun....they do taste good.  When you go to the grocery store for tomatoes, you can certainly find beautiful, round red things that look similar, but have zero of the actual taste of a tomato.  It is unfortunate, because they are so pretty.  They are actually working on the science needed to infuse store tomatoes with the "tomato taste".  That seems so wrong on so many levels when nature does that all by itself if given a little time.  A lot of what is missing from the store tomatoes is what they develop in the last weeks of ripening.  Store tomatoes are picked early and then artificially ripened later so they will last while being shipped all over the world....I know, sad but very true.

The tomatoes that I adore the most are the really big, really ripe ones.  But when you grow them yourself, they are not always "pretty" tomatoes.  The ones that I adore tend to look a little like a prize fighter - big, beefy and with scars.  I will actually pick the seeds from these the most because it is clear to me that they know how to grow and they know how to survive in a rather hostile garden world.  Most people would probably throw out the tomatoes that I use the most.  With a sharp knife, even the most pathetic tomato can offer some amount of flesh to the pot and if they are entirely too far past their prime, there is a wonderful disposal system in place a my house that answers readily to the name, "Pig, Pig"  She comes running for any and all left over garden scraps, but I have to admit that rotten tomatoes appear to be a particular favorite of hers. 

In a typical batch, 30 pounds of tomatoes can typically yield about 10 quarts of puree.  That combined with 4 onions, 1 cup of dried basil, 1/2 cup of honey,  and various amounts of oregano, thyme, salt, lemon peel, parsley, cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg, and garlic powder all help to yield a concoction that fills the entire house with a wonderful smell and has one wondering what sort of pasta might be in the cupboard that can be cooked up before the sauce ever makes it into the jar.  

I know that for some, this would seem like a terribly monotonous thing to do - being a slave to the tomato plants for weeks on end, but honestly, the process is what makes it such a wonderful tradition.  Drying herbs that will be used takes time, patience and planning, onions are planted early to ensure that there will be enough big ones to add to the pot, tomato plants are planted, staked, weeded, and rescued from Tomato Horn Worms that look very much like the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland.  All these things come together in the kitchen on September and October days to create a sauce that will feed my family at least once a week.  There really is no better reminder of the warm late summer days than homemade marinara when you are deep in the grip of winter.