It's Just As Bad As You Think

Finally! Definitive proof of alien life right here on earth! Yes, my friends, that is an alien emerging from the skin (the SKIN) of a regular farm tomato. This leaves me wondering why the hell the aliens are always honing in on farms? What is it with them and corn patches, farmer's barns, and probing all those poor rural folk? Don't they know there is plenty of strange city meat folk to experiment on?

This appears to be the first ever tomato live birth. I find it just as fascinating as I find it distressing that what is supposed to be a piece of highly coveted fruit has just given birth to itself three or four times. This is not a reasonable fruit.

Today I acquired far more produce than I will have time to process. It still isn't officially tomato canning season here because tomatoes are very late this year, however, I managed to get enough to make a big pot of tomato sauce for eating this week. I also got tomatillos to make tomatillo salsa with, plus some jalapenos, eggplants and squash for ratatouille, and I finally picked a bunch of the yellow plums that are overhanging our yard. We didn't have to go far to forage for those!

The plums don't have a strong plum flavor but they do have a pleasing sweet/tart fruitiness that will lend itself well to being a glaze on things like fruit tarts and other fancy dishes if the jam I made with them doesn't thrill us. I still have more and my friend Chelsea suggested making a plum sauce with them and I am going to do it! Most Asian style plum sauces are made with red or purple plums but the golden color of these plums will look nice too. I will use more sugar than the regular recipe calls for so that I can use this sauce like a sweet and sour Chinese dipping sauce. You know the kind I'm talking about? Bright pink syrupy sauce that has a sourness that tastes so good when spring rolls are dipped into it? I'm going to attempt to make a golden version of that.

So, that's a lot of work cut out for me. Luckily the kid has a friend over and so I can putz around in the kitchen all I want. Til my back falls off of my bones.

I want to say right here, right now, that I have not been overly sympathetic to my friends and family members who have deep aversions to yellow jackets. I have been followed around by them but generally found that if I didn't freak out they would eventually buzz off. Today I saw a different side of those wasps. I experienced the side that makes people quiver in their shoes and piddle on their carpets.

I was in my kitchen, pretty much minding my own business and not bounty hunting innocent flying creatures when, while trying to wash out my small enamel canner, I felt an intense sting in my arm. I looked at my arm and saw a yellow jacket attached to me by it's nasty syringe-size stinger and started swatting at it. I guess wasps don't like it when people swat at them so it starts lunging in at me trying to attack. Yes, it tried for my hip and I could almost feel the sting before I brushed it off again at which point it made for my chest. I'm thinking this dude had female issues.

Obviously I dropped my canner on the floor in this age old scuffle between people and nature (I'm thinking a Jack London style movie could be made from this epic saga) and ran screaming outside. My kid and his friend came to see what the big deal is. There's nothing like a couple of partially toothless skeptical seven year olds to make you feel foolish.

What I really wanted to do was leave the brave little men alone in the house and hightail it down to the pub to drink my shivers away and not come back until the natural life span of this evil winged beast was over. Naturally I'm not allowed to do things like that as a parent. So I had no choice but to show those two kids that I am a woman not to be messed with by some puny hairy looking punk.

So about two false entries into the danger zone I finally faced my foe like a man and caught him in a glass jar and released him outside in the front of the house.

I'll be damned if he didn't wing his way back to my porch within forty five minutes.

All this is to say: I understand now. I won't mock you guys any more. I promise. My sting still hurts and while it hardly compares to having given birth on the pain-o-meter it is a memorable moment.

I'm off to make sauces. I will be the sauce queen. Another time I'll tell you about how Max is teaching me to play chess and how scary it is how good he is at it for a seven year old.

Slow Oven Roasted Tomatoes

This method of slow roasting tomatoes comes to me from my good friend Lisa E.. The point isn't to completely dry them, just to concentrate the flavors to take complete advantage of the tomato's flavor potential. Later in the week I'll be posting a recipe that uses these tomatoes so you can ask yourself how you've lived so long without them. You need to try it soon because in-season tomatoes will be done in the next month. You can make extra batches of these and freeze them.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil to catch all the drippings. Then place a drying rack on top of it. This lets the oven air circulate around the tomatoes for better drying out. If you don't have one, you can still make these, just put the tomatoes directly on the foil. They won't dry out as well but you'll still get the deepened flavor. A great alternative is to use paste tomatoes which don't drip as much.

Slice tomatoes thickly (between 3/8" and 1/2" thick). They are going to shrink quite a bit.

Lay them out on the rack closely together. (So you can fit as many as possible on one baking sheet). Incidentally, I always do two trays at a time. I do this because I can't make small batches of things. I like to make as much as possible. Some people call this "greed", but I prefer to call it SMART.

Brush all top sides of the tomatoes with either olive oil or other cooking oil. This will help develop a rich texture. Everything roasts better with oil.

Sprinkle with salt.

NOT SALT. This is the secret weapon.

Sprinkle with SUGAR. Lisa says this is VERY important. If you have used a slicing tomato then turn them all over and brush with oil and sprinkle with salt and sugar. You won't have to do this if you use paste tomatoes.

Put them in the oven and cook for several hours. Yes, I know, it isn't a quick recipe, but it is so easy I think you won't mind the hours they tie up your oven racks. If you do two trays of them at once, I suggest switching the trays between the top and bottom rack every hour or so so that they all bake evenly.

They're done when they are dried out a bit, are half their original size, darken in color, and smell richly of tomato. There's no exact baking time. you will have to just wait until they look like the above picture.

Now what to do with them? Are you serious? You can chop them up and add them to pasta (that's a recipe I will post later in the week) or on sandwiches, or on pizza, or...

I have just done a couple of batches of slow oven roasted paste tomatoes and I think those are my favorites, but using the slicing ones make them perfect for sandwiches.

Hey, should I have some clever way of signing off? Don't all recipe people have some cute thing they say as they raise their glass to you at the end of a recipe, such as "bon apetite"? Or "good eats" or "Invite me to dinner"?

Salsa Water

Notice the lipstick? I must say, lipstick really makes a difference. I've known this for so long it amazes me that I ever forgot. I do remember declaring when I was seventeen and stupid that I would never be caught dead leaving the house without make up. That was back before I learned not to use the cursed word "never". You may find yourself wondering how the hell I can bring myself to wear such outre sunglasses...but if you're asking this question then you are behind the times my friend. Didn't you know that the '80's is the new '70's?

(I have a whole dissertation in my head about the asinine nature of this particular statement which is forever cropping up in fashion magazines "Pink is the new black", "50 is the new 40" (with regards to age), "Casual is the new formal"...etcetera. You may as well say that "Penis is the new vagina" for all it really makes any sense.)

Yesterday was another gorgeous day to be out and about. I had to go back to the farm to pick up the peppers I left there, so obviously I had to pick more tomatoes too. And a few more jalapenos. I thought I might take you along. This is what the world looks like from my scooter. Hop on man, let's go to the farm! (Doesn't that make this post so interactive you almost feel the bugs in your own hair?)

Here is one of the many crosses I see on the road sides. This particular road has it's share of ghosts. I don't know what happened to Kate, Katie, and Michael, but I'm pretty sure they were Hispanic and catholic. I only guess this due to the exuberant display of catholic offerings with the slightly cooler Latino flair than my own catholic relatives are likely to have. I risked my limbs for this shot. The road is very small and there's no place to really pull over. I wonder if that's how Kate, Katie, and Michael bit it? Were they just trying to get a more pastoral shot of this pretty landscape when they were tragically bumped into the next life?

Another ghost on this road is a young man who apparently died trying to procure drugs which he was rather fond of. Meth was his nectar. Unfortunately, his body was recently found in a fifty gallon drum on a farm on this road. See, I can't stop thinking about it which I would like to do, but I read the paper last week (big mistake) and this is what I find out about. This is not useful news to me. I already am aware that there are thousands of lost bodies stashed in weird places on the planet just waiting to be discovered, or not. I don't actually need to know the precise location of where they were stashed once found, especially when it's in my neck of the woods.

This is heaven. An endless field of tomatoes. Tomatoes as far as the eye can see. My ambition is to fill every cupboard space in my house with canned tomatoes so that all winter long I can open up that sunshine and have myself some home-made tomato soup on a cold winter day with a hunk of home made bread. I had a great talk with one of the farm owners, Chris, about their policy on pesticides. Bernard's Farm rarely sprays their crops, and when they do the only thing they use is an organic natural rosemary oil. Chris says it's important to her that people be able to go out in her field, pick a tomato, and eat it right there without worrying about chemical contamination. However, they cannot be certified organic because they use a non organic fertilizer.

This is how many tomatoes fit in my apron.

(I was on a role with this post when I got a call from the school that Max had a bloody nose that wouldn't stop and it had been twenty minutes and he was getting really upset...I just got back from sitting with him while the dizziness subsided. You can't call the hospital for advice on whether you should come in to emergency or not, and the advice nurse at the doctor's office is never immediately available and generally will call you back within two hours.

So essentially, we're always in our own hands when it comes to drawing the emergency line. That really sucks. Our doctor told us that a twenty minute nose bleed is the limit they should go, beyond that we should take Max to the hospital. But what the hell will they do for him? This one stopped right at about twenty minutes. I think the office gets tired of seeing my son and I feel bad for Max having to be the kid who is always bleeding.)

This is what I took home with me.

Heading back to the barn to weigh up my pick. I love it here. It's a very calm productive spot full of potential meals and abundance, I find it addictive to come pick my own vegetables here. I love it even more now that I know for sure that they don't spray with anything except a rare dose of rosemary oil.

Before heading into the barn I couldn't help but stop to pick a few jalapenos since I used up most of my stash the day before. I didn't wear gloves to pick them. We need to talk about that later.

Over forty pounds of produce for $19.00 is such a great price. Especially when most of that is tomatoes. I fit it all on my scooter. I admit that there are moments at the grocery store and at the farms when I wonder if I'll really be able to fit it all onto my little vehicle, but I always manage.

Tuesday I made a salsa recipe that I got from Karmyn at Dreaming What Ifs... and then yesterday I used a recipe from a pamphlet of recipes developed by The Pacific Northwest Extension. The one I did yesterday was supposed to make 16 to 18 pints of salsa. That would certainly have been the case if what I wanted was SALSA WATER. I not only squeezed all the seeds out (the juiciest bit) but I had to cook that salsa for over an hour and also ladle out several quarts of watery tomato juice. I like salsa to be thick enough to hang onto a chip. So what I ended up with after a huge day of work was 8 pints of salsa.

I also made some stewed tomatoes from the leftover fifteen pounds of tomatoes I picked on Tuesday. They turned out really well, I mean, they didn't ooze out of the jars after removal from the boiling water bath, and nothing floats to the surface. I want to do this recipe I found in a British preserving book but I can't figure out how to make it work with the recommendations of the USDA. So then I was thinking of freezing some tomato sauce or soup, but I know tomatoes can well so I'm reluctant to waste energy freezing anything I'm unsure of.

I've also slow roasted a couple of batches. I will certainly post the recipe for these in the next couple of days. The great thing is that you don't need a bushel of tomatoes and it takes almost no work to do them.

Here are a few tips I'd like to give to anyone who is canning this week:

• Obviously don't douse yourself in boiling water. You'd think this is something we all already know, yet only two weeks ago I shuffled across my patio with a pot of boiling water and got myself good. So really: Don't run with boiling water kids...

• You know how people are forever saying you should handle all hot peppers with gloves? I'm a tough girl and I don't listen to pansy advice like this, do you? There's a difference between chopping three roasted jalapenos and de-seeding sixteen of them raw. The difference is: skin that burns for 12 hours no matter how hard you try to scrub your skin off of your hand. Yes, I bought myself some latex gloves for the purpose of handling hot peppers and the next time you plan to handle hot peppers, I recommend you follow that advice. Unless you are one of those people that find pain sexy, in which case go ahead and take the pain highway, just don't tell me how much you like it because things will be uncomfortable between us for a while if you do.

• If a salsa recipe says the yield will be 8 pints, be advised that in all likelihood what they mean is that you will get 8 pints of SALSA WATER, or 4 pints of regular salsa. Ladling out the watery part that settles on the top will reduce the total time it takes to get your salsa to a regular consistency.

Now I must be off to cook more tomatoes. Which I don't feel like doing because I am coming down with a cold. Think I can trick it into never arriving? I am actually shocked that it has been over a year since the last time I got a cold. Ever since Max was born I went from getting sick once a year to getting every single cold that drifted through town. Hell, if Carla in Kentucky got a cold I'd get it from her. This is the first year that I've gone back to my normal cold programming. I still wish I wasn't feeling it coming on though. So maybe I should make some delicious soothing tomato soup?

Note: Finally the advice nurse called me back and guess what? After a year of torture and agony and us begging for answers or help with the bloody nose situation, they've made us an appointment with the ear throat nose specialist. Of course, I know what will happen there too. They're going to tell us there's nothing that can be done, there are no answers that we don't already have. But the point is: it took a year for the doctor to decide that this might be an issue? They didn't think this was an appropriate step way back in (whenever that was) when I almost passed out from the bloody nose that came out both nostrils like a river for twenty minutes and the only reason I didn't pass out was because Philip DID?

Homemaker Action Figure

If they ever design a homemaker action doll, can I be the designer? This would be her super suit: a Vespa helmet, goggles*, a cheerful apron, comfy black clothes, flip flops, and lipstick**...

She's ready for anything!

Such as flying to a farm on the back roads letting the warm air rush past her; picking forty pounds of tomatoes and an apronful of ancho chilies in less than an hour; making one big batch of salsa even though the peppers were left behind*** in her super rush to make hay while the sun still shines; after hours she whipped up six batches of pesto for the freezer, filed all the papers that were threatening to kill her in a great big paper strangle, and though it was a struggle...she managed to write out a bunch of checks for bills all on just under 2,000 calories. Which included some modest amounts of beer.

That's right. You don't need to clean out your ears. I said MODEST amounts of beer. See, I'm very vain and it's finally getting to me that being as porky as I am prevents me from wearing my super-chic aprons without looking like myrtle the giant pig. (I would link to a picture of her majesty if I could access them on the old computer, but I can't. You'll have to use that fertile imagination of yours.) Myrtle is the biggest hog I have ever seen. Absolutely queenly proportions and some serious teeth with which to nosh on ears of corn with all the grace of a...of a...well, she's got no grace at all, actually. Anyway, the beer was modest, the hour of sleep not ridiculous.

Oh yes, and she managed to go to the gym and do the cardiovascular portion of her work out. Is that not all worthy of an action figure? Tell me Arnold can do better. You can't.

*Sunglasses are way cooler looking but I broke mine while picking tomatoes and if you don't wear some sort of protective eye-wear while scootering your eyeballs become a mini-windscreen against which bugs will die. I had these goggles at home waiting to be worn for rainy conditions or night time driving when sunglasses would be dangerous. But I think they have a serious dork factor to them.

**About the lack of lipstick...I admit that my ensemble wasn't complete and there's no excuse not to wear lipstick to go tomato picking. Something I will rectify today.

***In her girl scout-like preparedness she had a bag full of jalapeno peppers picked just two days previously waiting to be used and in a dexterous switching of recipes, she made do.

Eggplant, Death, and Taxes

I have a plethora of pretty eggplant pictures to share but my six year old broke my computer so I'm writing from our laptop which I haven't been able to upload pictures to.

Yesterday I did a lot. I worked from morning until night while letting Max ruin my computer playing some car racing game. I made ratatouille. I grilled eggplant rounds. I baked eggplant. I took pictures of the baked eggplant I gutted and stuffed with the most wonderful lemon thyme stuffing that I made up on the spur of the moment. Then I ate eggplant. I burned my tongue on eggplant. If I was a cartoon I would have eggplant reflections in my eyes instead of pupils.

I want more eggplant. But first I need to finally procure the freezer I've decided to buy. I found it at Lowe's for a good price. A 14.1 cubic foot upright manual defrost unit made by Fridgidaire. I plan to fill it with eggplant so that when I am longing for an eggplant sandwich in the middle of winter when the icy rain is coming down, I can defrost myself some sunshine. I want to also fill the freezer with tomatoes.

I find it fascinating that my favorite vegetables are all related to bella donna. Potatoes, tomatoes, and eggplant all belong to the same family. All of them have either been believed to be poisonous at one time or another, or actually have poisonous components (as in: potato leaves). I hear about all these diet restrictions that people impose on themselves through a nutritionist's advice, or through blood-type diets and tomatoes are frequently cited as a problem food.

So could a person like myself be suffering because of eating too many tomatoes, but not realize the life of blooming health I could be experiencing, if only I would give up tomatoes? I wonder, because in my experience, when one is allergic to a food, even in a mild way, one can't help but notice that they don't feel good after eating said food. If tomatoes are bad for me, I think I wouldn't feel so damn good after eating them. They don't just taste good to me, they feel good in every way.

I don't eat bell peppers because they repeat on me. They've been repeating on me since I was a small child. I would watch my mother prepare stuffed green peppers with dread because I never felt good after eating them. I didn't get sick, I would just burp them up for twelve hours afterwards. It wasn't until I was an adult, cooking for myself, that I realized I didn't have to eat them anymore, and that if my body consistently burped them up no matter how they were prepared or whether they were red or green or yellow, I probably was mildly allergic to them or incapable of digesting them well. Both good reasons not to eat them. Since eradicating them from my diet, I have been much happier and felt much better.

You'd be amazed at how many dishes bell peppers end up in. You could macerate them and hide them and I will always know if they've been in the food I'm eating. It's like meat, you could make a dish that gave no hint of meat, cleverly disguising it, but I will know within an hour that I have eaten flesh or eaten something that's been cooked with flesh. Why? My stomach doesn't digest it. I burp up meat flavor. Seriously. Can you think of anything more revolting? I know, I can too. But still, burping flavors I don't like in the first place is one of those experiences in life that I can just do without.

You know what freaks me out? To eat black bean soup and an hour later suddenly burp up pig flavor. That happened to me once. Do you know how freaky it is to never eat meat, not even as a kid, and suddenly have meat burps? When that happened to me I dug the soup can out of the trash can at work where I had eaten it and read the ingredients. Sure enough, the beans had been cooked with ham hocks or some such piggy parts.

Potatoes are one of those foods I can eat endlessly. Every single day. Almost any way. Except with bell peppers or meat, obviously. I love potato lore, it's history, it's plenitude. I love it's earthiness. I love how well it goes with everything. I don't actually eat potatoes as often as I would like. Especially since vowing never to buy conventionally grown ones ever again.* So I have my twenty pounds of garden potatoes that I've been slowly working on from the pantry since early summer, and the supply is getting low.

Today I'm reluctantly setting aside my obsession with storing nuts in my cheeks for the winter and I'm going to work in my studio. Finish up a few projects. (To pay for the freezer, actually). But my mind is going to be drifting through recipe books, the farm fields where tomatoes and eggplants continue to ripen just for me. I'm sending them messages that I will come for them, like a mother-ship to her alien babies.**

My own garden is finished for the year. I just picked the last bowl of produce last night. If I had had my act together, I would have planted a winter garden and it would be gearing up. But I didn't. That's alright. There's always next year. Unless death or taxes get to me first.




*You won't either if you read Michael Pollan's book "The Botany Of Desire".
**What the??!!!!!!

The Ranch (garden) Report

I would love to develop a cottage garden. "Cottage" has such a wonderfully pretty sound to it. If it's "cottage-y" it must be cozy and lovely, right? But "Ranch Garden" doesn't have the same ring to it. When I think of "Ranch Garden" what comes to mind is a slightly thirsty landscape covered in a nice bloom of dust. I think of arid deserts, cattle, and scrubby plants. Not very cozy and pretty, though I suppose it has it's own charm.

It's convenient too because I can tell you right now that my most recent gardening method has been to parch everything as a kind of test. Whatever plants are still standing at the end of this season will get to left there to rot all winter long-quite a privilege don't you think?

Buttercup squash don't like to be parched so I only have about two maturing at the moment. I am in love with this one right here. You know, I have never actually eaten a buttercup squash but this is the third time I've tried to grow it because I was seduced by pictures of them in the Seeds Of Change catalog. I can't wait to eat this one. The Pink Banana squash, on the other hand, is capable of making it through a nuclear holocaust and is currently taking over my yard. I'm not sad about that because I've got at least five big ones developing and I know they're good because I've had them from my mother's garden.

This is a Caspian Pink, the winner of our first ever Williamson/Evich family tomato taste test of last year. The Black Krim have turned out quite good this year so we'll have to compare the two if a Caspian gets ripe enough before the Krim's are all gone. I seem to favor tomatoes with Eastern European origins.

There's been some good snail eatin' here at the ranch. These girls now expect to be given escargots every single day, unfortunately, now that I really have quite a lot of snails around, I can't seem to find where they're hiding now that they've caught on to what I do with those I find.

I keep Chick out of the vegetable garden. So while I'm watering she stands there looking devastated. She doesn't really want to spend quality time with me amongst the veg, what she really wants is to get out of our yard all together, which is something she can do in two and a half seconds.

Rudebekia are one of my favorite flowers. I love my mom's yard furniture too which we bought from Keith at the farmer's market.

And lastly, poppy seed pods.

So this morning while Max and I were sitting in bed petting an enthusiastic Chick and Philip was trying to sleep, Max said:

"Wouldn't that be totally funny if Chick licked George Bush to death?"

Wow. And then while I was digesting that gem he popped this one into the room:

"No, wait, what if I talked George Bush to death? I would just talk and talk and talk and talk until he just died because I would never stop talking to him?"


Seriously George, even six year olds are sick of your shit.