Good drink and good food are natural partners so it’s no suprise that winemakers are often gardeners, and I’m no exception. A successful vegetable garden means plenty of produce to eat, give away, and preserve. Although most of my garden was wiped out this year by flooding in the area (Before and After), I still had enough tomatoes to can a batch of sauce this past weekend.
I had just over a bushel, here they’re washed and ready to be cored, trimmed, and chunked.
Then they’re simmered in a heavy stockpot until soft enough to mill out.
A heavy-duty Kitchen-Aid is invaluable for milling the tomatoes to remove the skins and seeds. I used to do it by hand with one of these, which was a long and tedious process.
After cooking down to the desired consistancy, jars are filled, lidded and ringed. Then it’s into the big pot in the background for a good boil.
The end results, 15 quarts of sauce. ChicagoDyke cans her tomatoes with seasoning and other stuff for ready-made spaghetti sauce which is convenient, but I prefer to do mine with no seasoning so I can go any direction with it when cooking.
So why go to all the bother? Taste! I grow 31 plants each year, usually 5-7 different varieties (started myself from seed) which are blended into the sauce. I’ve choosen favorites for flavor, acidity, pulp and color and have never found a commercial product that can match it. Tomatoes are so easy to grow, everyone should have at least one plant for salads and snacking!
Front page
Oh, my....tomatoes. Real tomatoes.
*lipquiver*
*puppydog eyes*
*SOB!*
I MISS MY GARDEN!
Edie
Can’t have a veggie garden in Yosemite. Or pets. But I can get pics like this:
http://flickr.com/photos/ambitious_wench…
Edie, you're living in Yosemite?
Where? How? Why?
We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan
In honor of the tomatoes
One of my favorite bands:
And in honor of our Tennessee contingent
: We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—XanEdie either leases an inholding
(area inside the park boundaries but never officially bought by the NPS—most of the bigger parks have such properties) or works for the NPS, would be my guess.
Or a concessionaire….
In either case Edie, come over here and sit by me. I always read the Morning Report because I follow NPS goings-on for both de blog here and my day job. Although hardly ever do Civil War parks get coverage in MR, they lead dull lives mostly to everyone’s great relief. :)
Thanks, Edie
That’s a gorgeous picture.
And a great clip, Lambert. I’m a Little Feat fan too.
very nice, feral
you should tell us more about starting from seed. that’s the tricky part for many people.
as for canning the pure tomato essence- i’m into that, just not this year. i agree it’s very nice to have your own sauce ready to go for other dishes, but you’re right, and i’m lazy and just willing to eat a lot of premade spagetti topping. it’s fine on crystal noodles and mixed in with burger meat as well, in sandwiches.
and let me add that i agree about the mixer
but the price can be daunting. look for them on ebay or at yard and estate sales, most of the time they’re well made enough that even a used one will last you a long while.
mixer attachments are a fun consumerist fetish to have in the kitchen. so far i’ve managed to control mine, but i know someday when i’m older i’ll give in and have them all.
Starting Seeds
ChiDy, that’s a good idea. If I’m still doing this next spring I’ll do a few posts with pics.
And yeah, I’m well on my way to a collection of mixer attachments. Gotta have the grinder, as others work off of that. Then the strainer for tomatoes and such, the sausage stuffer for making brats, the pasta maker and cutter, etc, etc…
CD, if you want to start tomatoes from seed
affordably in Illinois, now’s a good time to pick up “end of season / clearance” “cold frames” or “starter kits”.
If you have a south, east, or west-facing window, with an interior sill or an interior recess into which you can fab up a sill via a shelf kit or a suitably-altered for pressure-fit piece of, say, 1x6, then you have a place for your starting.
You’ll want a good mixture of bedding (I like 50% potting soil, 30% peat moss and 20% clean sand, but that’s just me).
Get a couple of egg cartons (paper ones, please, if you can), cut the lids off and use them underneath the egg-cup sections as drip trays, and set them on your window sill.
Fill each egg cup with about 1/4 cup of your bedding mixture. Poke a hole into the middle with your pinkie, as deep as the first joint (shallower if you wear long nails). Drop in a seed. Loosely fill the hole with additional bedding material. Water lightly — not so much you compact the soil, but enough so it’s moist (don’t soak through into the egg cup: a tablespoon of water per seed is plenty this time).
Start them about six weeks before you intend to put them in the ground (e.g. if your “last frost” date is 20 March, start them around 5 February). Check daily, water (same amount of water until you see definite leaves) every other day (or if in direct all day sun every day). If you don’t see greenery over the tops of the soil within 5 days, start over.
Ideally when you get ready to set them in the ground you’ll have plants about pencil-size, with six to eight good leaves. Use a box cutter and separate the egg cups and bury the cups whole in your garden, bringing the soil up about 1/2” above the paper.
This is the method my mom used for years, and years, and years. It worked in West Texas and Southwest Missouri. She would raise beefsteak tomatoes this way because seed, we could afford (and some years we saved some tomatoes for the purpose of re-planting), whereas plants, later on, we might not have $$ for.
And be practical with seed selection
I went all gung-ho with a package of “heirloom” seeds this spring (same technique as Sarah described except I sprung for a plastic tray with little expandable-when-you-put-water-on-it discs of peat moss). Of course these proved to have no resistance whatever to fusarium wilt, which all of my soil seems to be infested with.
Plants grew like crazy, until they got big enough to start thinking about putting out blossoms. Then the dread brown stem and browning leaves started working their way up from the bottom, and the whole project turned out to be a waste of time.
Oh, I got some tomatoes, but they were about the size of golf balls and with about as much taste. Feh. The disease-resistant Early Girl and…whatever the other one was, Park Something, were hard hit by the drought but at least produced enough to keep me out of the tomato aisle at the store for sandwich toppers for the last few months. No way were there enough to bother making up sauce.
BTW did either of you see GWPDA’s technique for making roasted tomato sauce for canning? Simplifies about six steps out of the process and everybody who’s tried it is raving. I forget the details but if you catch her some night in comments you might ask.
Roasted Tomato Sauce
I’ve made a roasted sauce for immediate consumption, but not for canning. I’ll have to check on that, sounds interesting!