Preserving the harvest

I still love cooking, with a special fondness for baking and preserving. But I have to say that my stamina and attention span for long involved processes has diminished.
So my favorite tools of the season are the Instant Pot, immersion blender, and food mill.
I've made two batches of marinara by simply throwing everything in the pot. Well, not exactly throwing - there is some rough chopping involved, and the onion and carrot and garlic get a bit of saute in the olive oil first. Then when it's all done and cooled some, I blitz it in the pot.
I've been portioning this out, mostly as one cupfuls for one person's pasta, and freezing it.
But I've had an idea which I hope will turn out to be a bright one. I'm going to make the recipe one more time, subbing peppers, sweet and hot, for the carrot and some of the onion, and using vinegar (sherry?) as the liquid instead of the wine called for in the original recipe guideline. When it's whizzed "to the desired consistency," as the recipes say, I'll have salsa. With my handy pH strips I can see if it's then okay to can, and do that to save a little freezer room.
Oh - and meanwhile I have some roasted small tomatoes, given the immersion blender treatment to use in tomato-herb bread.
Here's the guideline I've been using for the marinara:
https://www.simplyhappyfoodie.com/instant-pot-marinara-fresh-tomato-sauce/
Except with paste tomatoes - I have San Marzanos - using just one 6 ounce can of organic tomato paste to give it a little more backbone.
And https://www.daringgourmet.com/fresh-roasted-tomato-and-herb-bread/
This impossibly long blog entry has a good recipe for the bread, which has never met a cheese it didn't like.

July garden report

Today I brought home chard (too much), some string beans (the rattlesnake beans are just beginning to pump), and a serving of strawberries. Two-tone zucchini is ripening, though slowly, and there's one tomato on the verge.
I feel behind in the tomato department, but as I toured the other plots this morning I noted that only cherry tomatoes are doing much. The marine layer keeps returning - a good thing from an overheated  human perspective - and that means most of the tomatoes will be ripe in August, September, and into October. My Early Girl and Imwalle Special have set plenty of fruit. The San Marzano looks like it will be last of all, and not very prolific.
Meanwhile there are almost full-sized green Fresno peppers; the bell peppers have set fruit. The Sunshine winter squash has several fruit growing fast, and the butternut I got in earlier is not too far behind. The other butternut and the Italian green beans - late additions both, along with a Lisa Simpson summer squash - are still making up their minds. One of the three dry bean varieties (Good Mother Stallard?) is loaded with pods, and the others (Christmas Lima and Rio Zape) are are blossoming and beginning to set. There are a few beets and some perennial chard in the developmental stages. I've thinned both once. 
Tomorrow we harvest the remaining plum trees on the edge of the garden, to get the fruit to the FISH food pantry.
And I still haven't learned any Tigrinya.

What a difference a year makes

Everything in the garden is different this year.

A relatively dry winter - except for a sopping wet March - means that cool weather things are fading fast.  I found one bud on the peas - they put out like crazy, and don't appear to be bouncing back to bloom some more, even though the weather has been a little cooler the last couple of weeks.

On the other hand, I got overly enthusiastic and started my tomatoes inside too early, aided by a better insulated greenhouse window and a new heating mat.  So - I put them in the ground early.  And three varieties - the Rutgers, the Orange King, and the cherry - have set fruit!  I may have tomatoes in July (if we don't get lots of June gloom) instead of a few teasers in August and no real production until Labor Day like last year.

I've gotten a few reports from those with whom I shared my plants, too, and they are pleased.  I might become a hero, when, alas, it is really just our very variable weather.

I'm having to water a couple of areas that need some digging so I can plant my pole beans.   The only plants left on the potting bench at home are winter squash - to go in within the week - and the eggplant, which will go in when the garlic comes out - and that will probably be early this year, too.  It's looking fat and fine.  

The sage garden I planted around our sign is coming along and beginning to look pretty good.   But the best photo I took yesterday is of the tricolor culinary sage in my plot.  Between the sign planting and my plot I now have nine (9) species and/or varieties of perennial sage.   I must be craving sagacity.

Tomato Longings - May food of the month

Here's what I wrote for Trinity's newsletter this month:

I don’t know about you, but once the tomato plants are ready to go in the ground, I start salivating for a vine-ripened tomato.   I have to keep reminding myself, though, that it’s usually sometime in July, or in cool summers even later, before I get one from my own Sonoma County garden.   And it’s summer’s end before my picking basket feels the full weight of seasonal bounty.  

When I looked in my freezer and cupboard a few days ago, I realized supplies were low from last summer’s preserving.  This is the season when I sometimes turn to canned tomatoes; and we can assume that our hungry neighbors do, too.

So - May’s food of the month is CANNED TOMATOES & TOMATO SAUCE.

What’s in a can?  Well, it’s sometimes hard to tell, but it is often true that the flavor of canned tomatoes is better than the out of season tomatoes on sale at this time of year.  They have been bred to endure long bumpy trips and gassed into redness.

Did you know you can boost the flavor of canned whole tomatoes by roasting them, just as you would fresh?  Drain a couple of 28 ounces cans, reserving the liquid for another use if you like.  Put the tomatoes in a roasting pan and drizzle with olive oil.  Roast at 375 degrees for 40 minutes or more, until they begin to darken and shrink some.   These are great for soups, stews and sauces.

Reading the labels will tell us if the tomatoes inside the can were grown organically, and how much salt has been added: but it’s tricky to tell where the tomatoes were grown.  Labels tell the country of origin, and where the distributor is located, but not where produce comes from. We can make a guess, though, because 94% of canned tomatoes from the USA are from California. Our own UC Davis leads the way in commercial tomato production research.  

The other thing labels don’t reveal is how the workers who tended the tomatoes and picked them and got them into the can were treated and compensated.   Some of the worst cases of abuse of agricultural workers in this country have occurred in tomato fields.   Activists are working toward domestic standards for Fair Trade, to parallel those we have internationally for coffee, tea, cocoa, and other crops.   Stay tuned.