Thirty Pounds of Tomatoes

After reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle last month I was inspired to try canning my own tomato sauce. I bought 30 pounds of tomatoes from my CSA farm and planned a whole day to play in the kitchen. Not to spoil the story, but I have to say, things did not go smoothly. The best I can say is that lessons were learned, and there's something in the freezer that I'll eat in December or January and remember these 100+ degree days of summer....

My first goof was thinking that I had 40 pounds of tomatoes instead of 30. I didn't realize the misstep until much later in the day. Meanwhile, I froze 10 pounds of tomatoes whole. That left 20 pounds of tomatoes for cleaning, peeling, and seeding.

Here's what 20 pounds looks like:
And cleaning, peeling, and seeding takes much more time than you think. The novelty wore off a few hours into the day, but here's a picture when I was still giggly with the spirit of adventure:

So, my next miscalculation was the size of a pot you would need to create 10 quarts of tomato sauce. Fortunately, I was only dealing with 20 lbs instead of the 30 lbs called by the recipe. My biggest pot was only six quarts, and the amount of puree from 20 lbs was barely enough to fit:

Ah well. Sometimes the Universe just helps you out. At this point, I realized that my inexperience/ineptitude in the kitchen, mixed with the threat of botulism, were probably good enough reasons to go with freezing instead of canning. Plus, another benefit of freezing meant that I could throw in leftover veggies from the bottom of my icebox so they wouldn't go bad when I went on my week-long vacation. Problem(s) solved!

So, with my kitchen ship righted and my new course charted, I was ready to create some yummy Italian-style, ad hoc marinara. The reducing started early afternoon .... and took forever.

First, I was just trying to reduce it enough to get all the puree to fit in the pot, and then I remembered that I was supposed to be adding spices! So add them I did. I tried to act quickly to make up for lost time... and ended up adding the spices in the correct proportion to the 30 lb recipe, not the 20.

Well, by 9 at night I just decided to call it. The total quantity of sauce was about 4.5 quarts, about half that being spices. But what the heck. I figure I can always 'dilute' the sauce later with store-bought, canned tomato sauce.

(Yes, indeed. When Perfection went out the door, I had to throw Pride with it.)

I pride myself on knowing what my readers want.

You want to know what Johanna and I had for dinner last night.

Answer: turkey stroganoff with a side of cauliflower. But not just any cauliflower. Last week, Johanna's CSA provided us with a head of purple cauliflower.


How does one cook up purple cauliflower? We had no idea. We decided to try the old South Beach Diet recipe for fake mashed potatoes, which uses cauliflower, to create purple fake mashed potatoes.

We had no idea how it would turn out: is the cauliflower purple on the inside, or was it just spray-painted by a farmer?

Turns out it was purple through-and-through, as evidenced by how the steaming liquid ended up:

And here's how our meal looked in the end:


Bon Appetit!

Yeah! Fall!

Despite the fact that Fall is pumpkin season, most recipes with pumpkin call for canned pumpkin puree. Well I got a pumpkin from my CSA box last week and made my own puree, which I found out that I can freeze in pre-measured amounts. Haven't made anything with the puree yet, but it did taste yummy. Here's a pict of the pumpkin. Not sure what kind it is. It has a mellow flavor.



It took forever to steam. And I came closer to buying a honest-to-goodness food processor as my baby 5-in-1 mixer was really straining to mash all the pumpkin.

Joining a CSA

I went ahead and joined a CSA (community supported agriculture) group here in Austin last month. I'll receive a box of produce every two weeks.

My first goal is to not let any of it go bad. Have no idea what I'm going to do with okra. I guess I'll think of the box like the secret ingredients in a really dull episode of Iron Chef.