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Bean Blossom Creek |
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Lunch! I am not sure that there is a better summer lunch than having a fresh juicy vine ripe tomato chunked into a bowl , eaten in the hand like an apple, or sliced onto a hearty slice of bread for a fresh healthy and filling meal. I like to take my lunch to work and in the fresh tomato season that includes the fresh tomato cut up into bite sized pieces along with other fresh chopped veggies from my garden or one of the local farmers markets. Drizzle with a bit of oil and some balsamic vinegar this is delightful.
Sauce. My favorite preserving method is to crush my Roma paste type tomatoes, along with plenty of garlic, sweet pepper and onion into a very large kettle and cook the mixture until it is very thick. The ratios of ingredients are not terribly important to me. For about a half bushel or five gallon bucket of tomatoes, I add two or three cups each of pepper and onion. I add three to five heads of garlic. In some years I have added grated carrots. Once the sauce seems to be thick enough, I add fresh chopped basil leaves. I prefer to pressure can the sauce in pint jars for year round garden goodness. Dried tomatoes. Here in Michigan, I don’t like to sun dry my tomatoes becasue our humidity levels can be high in the summer. I use a home dehydrator to dry the paste style tomatoes into what I have recently started calling ‘tomato bacon’ or ‘tomato jerky’. The process usually takes about 24 hours in our current dehydrator. The result is a hard tomato strip, that can be used in dinner dishes like pasta or re-hydrated into any warm dishes. The flavors are bright and tangy.
Salsa. I regularly enjoy eating the summers tomato bounty as salsa with corn chips. My home made salsa is not as sticky or creamy as commercial salsa, but the flavor is right from the garden. Garlic, onion, sweet pepper join the tomatoes in the cooking pot usually along with a packet of salsa ingredients from Mrs. Wages or Ball brands.
Click on the picture to order it through Amazon, if your local stores don’t carry them.     Diced Tomato. We use the crudely chopped chunks of tomatoes in our soups, stews and chili recipes throughout the year. The easiest method of preserving the summer goodness is to roughly chop the cleaned and cored tomatoes into a large bowl. Mash them into pint jars, really pushing them down into the jars until they are juicing, then adding citric acid and processing the jars. To get a little farther along in the preparation of the future meal, I also add onion and pepper crudely chopped to the bowl and mix them with the tomatoes before filling the pint jars. I have started using citric acid instead of white vinegar to keep the acid level appropriate for safe canning. the result is a thicker product in the jar after processing. I used Ball Jar Citric Acid. Click on the picture to order it through Amazon, if you can not find it in your local stores.  
New and sixth use of the tomato abundance
Ketchup. I purchased some of the Mrs.Wages Ketchup mix that was on clearance a few years ago. This past week I decided to try making the ketchup. Julie is brand loyal to her off the shelf ketchup , but since I started enjoying balsamic vinegar ketchup, she suggested that I use balsamic vinegar in place of the plain jane white distilled vinegar that the Mrs. Wages recipe calls for. The result is delicious. I have not opened a jar of the hot water bath preserved ketchup, but tastes of the small amount left after canning make me think this is a good use of shelf space.    
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Garlic that was planted in October of 2016 was ready to be harvested this week. These plants took up a space of about 10 x 10 feet in the garden. That space will be made ready to have a crop of Fall lettuce planted. That corner of the garden was the site of my original compost pile. The ground is very crumbly and rich.
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AuthorsJulie has worked in the horticulture world for over 25 years. She has a degree in English Literature from University of Michigan. She is a member of the American Garden Writers Association. Archives
November 2017
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