Tomatoes and root vegetables

Tomatoes are so impatient. Dry beans will wait forever to get shelled and put in bags. But when a tomato is ready, you’d better get on it. One of my favorite ways to put up tomatoes is Baked Tomato Pasta Sauce. I have a precise recipe, but it only calls for a ridiculously low number of tomatoes (6). I use the method rather than the measurements.

Step 1: blanch room temperature tomatoes in boiling water for 10 seconds. Peel, core, cut in half, and deseed. My set up shows the blanched tomatoes in the pink tray, the skins and seeds in the blue bowl, and the finished tomatoes in the white bowl. I use the spoon handle to get the seeds out of tiny locules (the space where the seeds are, if you couldn’t infer that from context).

Prepping the tomatoes

Step 2: I put a lot of garlic, a fair amount of parsley and enough olive oil in the food processor to make a nice paste. This I smear on top of the tomatoes, which were previously arranged on two jellyroll pans and sprinkled with salt and pepper.

Tomatoes smeared with garlic, parsley, and olive oil

Step 3: Into the oven at 425° for an hour, after which they look like this:

After an hour in the oven

Step 4: I scrape the baked tomatoes into a bowl and pop in some tomato paste, butter and chopped basil. {Prepping the basil on the same day as everything else is WAY too much work. I throw basil and butter in the food processor and aliquot the resulting pesto-like substance into ½ cup containers and freeze them.] I squish everything together with the potato masher until the butter and basil melts and all the big chunks are broken up.

Finished sauce

Step 5: I put the sauce into four freezer containers and mentally check off four winter suppers, with perhaps a little left for lunch the next day or pizza night.

The beets and carrots are officially getting away from us. I harvested both today. I am working on pickled beets and eggs as I write this. I gave the very small and very large carrots to Hilda and made carrot sticks for my lunches.

Left to right: NutriRed, Mokum, Purple Haze, Danvers Half Long carrots, Detroit Red beets 

We grew four varieties of carrots this year: Purple Haze, NutriRed, Mokum, and Danvers Half Long. Danvers Full Size must be very long indeed, if there is such a variety. Mokum seems to not be tolerating the heavy soil. Some of them are rotten at the tip. Purple Haze only expresses the purple pigment on the outside of the cortex. Hilda said the center turned white when she roasted it. Interesting. NutriRed is a different color all the way through, suggesting a mutation in how it makes carotene. Whether or not it is actually more nutritious as the name implies is an open question not likely to be resolved by me.

Longitudinal sections of (left to right) Purple Haze, NutriRed, and Danvers Half Long

The pullets are getting bigger. They haven’t learned to come a-running when we show up with watermelon rinds or carrot peelings. In fact, they seem afraid of us. Probably traumatized by the broiler round up.

An as-yet-unnamed Rhode Island Red and Antonia

Remember how Terry and I put nylon bags on some of the apples at the beginning of the season? The experiment was not a success. In this photo, the upper apple was covered (I opened the bag and left the apple partially covered for the picture) and the one on the bottom was not covered. Which one looks better to you?

I have been enjoying two of my other favorite breakfasts, peaches with Cheerios and red raspberries with Frosted Mini-Wheats. We didn’t get any peaches this year, but the red raspberries are starting to ripen. I love picking raspberries, but I have to go back to work. Boo.

Peaches and Cheerios

Red Raspberries and Frosted Mini-Wheats