Until the last few days, the warm weather has been hanging on, and we've all been outside wearing shorts and riding bikes. But all that nice weather keeps the tomatoes ripening, and without intervention all the ones my family cannot eat (and that would be most of them) would go bad.
I know people love their iPhones, giant televisions, and salted caramel lattes, but to love a chest freezer is a special kind of love. This humble, quiet, out-of-the-way appliance allows me to enjoy the end of summer.
In the past, canning was done on a hot day in a hot kitchen. (If you haven't canned before, the house can heat up to a sweltering temperature if it's still warm outside.) Canning would be an ideal cold weather activity, like baking bread or making a hearty soup. A friend let me in on a secret a few years ago that changed my canning forever. She told me that you can freeze tomatoes whole in plastic bags and then take them out whenever you're ready to can. And if you let them warm up at room temperature, the skins come off without having to boil them, which is amazing when you are making a chunky tomato sauce or salsa!
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| My newest spaghetti sauce method is to core each tomato, squeeze out some of the seeds, and then freeze them all in gallon sized bags. When I'm ready to can, I make the sauce with the skins on (which adds additional nutrients) and then zip the sauce in the high speed blender to pulverize the skins and any remaining seeds before canning. |
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| Many fruits and veggies are easy to freeze and use right from the freezer: sliced peppers and any kind of berry are two of my favorites. |
This week at the urban farm
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| Now that soup weather is upon us, I've started harvesting the leeks. A lot of soup recipes call for leeks, but they are also good in many recipes in place of onions or roasted in the oven with other fall vegetables. |
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| The chickens are just starting their first molt, and because of this egg production is almost nil. Hopefully I will have more to report on this soon! They have had a good summer of romping around the yard and have appreciated the vegetable scraps this season. |
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| The tomatoes and flowers are the last summer plants I will pull out of the garden. The tomatoes will go when they stop ripening on the vine (I'll put the pink ones in the window and ripen them indoors). The flowers will go once they die or we get a hard freeze and the butterflies are gone for the year, whichever comes first. |
A note on fall eating and cooking: it's almost time to celebrate the harvest with fall meals: butternut squash soup, spaghetti and lasagna feasts, vegetables caramelized over time in warm ovens, stuffed and roasted acorn squash! Enjoy eating these warm and cozy foods; I hope you are all having a fantastic end of season!
