Deep In The Heart Of Tomato Season

Well it's finally happened.  I am officially up to my eyeballs in tomatoes!

Tomato plants are sneaky creatures.

You make sure their future home is rich in nitrogen, calcium, potassium, and toss in some rooting compound.

You plant them after the soil reaches 70 degrees, and then pray that you don't get a late, surprise chill.

You plant them deep, or laying down even, with just the tippy top leaves sticking out of the soil, the whole time apologizing to the once tall, lanky seedling, telling it, "you'll thank me later".

You spend the whole month of June, checking them for worm eggs, and leaf spot, and blight.  The stubby seedlings seem to mock you with each passing day despite your initial enthusiasm, which turns to begging, with then morphs into threats.

Late June finds you in the garden, buckets of fertilizer in tow, looking at scraggly knee high adolescent plants. You start to wonder if you should drag out the tie up strings, but then think against it.  Instead, you walk the rows, pinching off suckers and pruning.

July, and picnic season rolls around, and while the grocery store seems to have plenty of ruby red, ripe orbs, you have trouble even spotting a green marble.  Sigh...

Did I buy mutant, non-bearing, decorative plants?  Did I over fertilize?  Was it too wet? Too windy? Too cool?  Did I look at you wrong?  Was I singing off key? What do you want!? What!? Whaaaat!?

Then it happens.  You go out one morning and suddenly they're 3 feet tall and you find yourself running out of string for tie-ups.  Then they're 4 feet tall and you're looking for old t-shirts to shred and turn into more tie-ups. Green orbs and pear-drops are everywhere!  You look to the sky and and say "please no hail this year, not this year." And the hail passes you by (well, mostly).  The daily routine of walking the garden and pruning is now habit.  Your eyes dart to and fro looking for pests to throw to the giddy hens who so eagerly wait outside the garden fence, their voices high with excitement they pace back and forth for a tasty tidbit.  Worm after worm flies over the fence top, and are happily dispatched.

By the end of July, your daily mosey through the rows, becomes an expedition.  You start to wonder if you should have purchased the giant roll of twine instead of the single.  You begin to consider a pith helmet and a machete purchase from Amazon.  You add a black light flashlight to your arsenal to find the greedy hornworms and brown eyed tomato moths at night when they come out to devour whole plants and fruit while you sleep. The deep green fruit is becoming lighter, and lighter, until one morning......

There she is! Is it? Yes, it IS! Your first red tomato.  You can hardly believe it.  The unforgiving heat and humidity of August, which is the 7th level of Dante's inferno to all other living things, is the very weather the tomato plant lives for.  You pluck your treasure and take it inside.  Some consume this first prize warm and dusty right there in garden.  Was it an apple that tempted Adam? Or was it a Tomato, fresh from the vine?  Others carefully coddle their Precious close to their breast, hiding it from view of the hens, the neighbors, and even hovering spy satellites to gently wash it and place it on the counter.  It's thick red hide glistening under it's perfect green top hat as you contemplate it's demise.

The first week of August provides you enough for a salad and some beefy cuts on a roast beef and bagel sandwich.  Slow and steady wins the race they say, but this is silly. You find yourself addressing the entire garden, tapping your foot as you spray them with their weekly dose of food.  "This simply will not do!" Your pep talk comes out loud, unrelenting, and unforgiving, yet understanding.  You don't even care that passing bicyclists and walkers are listening in.  The troops MUST be told what is expected of them, what they can accomplish, and what their reward will be. (Although I don't know how much of a reward it is to them to be cut up and dropped in a pot, but it is their destiny.)  Patton would be proud.

The troops rally.  By the second week of August you're taking a small bucket to the garden in the morning to harvest.  By the end of the week the bucket has turned into a strong box.
  By the third week, the box has turned into a lug.  Processing tomatoes is turning into a twice a week project.






Almost ripe tomatoes are picked and covered with dark towels on every flat surface in the kitchen to prevent them from splitting after the overwhelming summer downpours.  The poundage tally board keeps climbing; 20 pounds, 40 pounds, 65 pounds, 110 pounds, up and up it goes.

The canning recipes come out and the pressure canner becomes a permanent resident of the kitchen stove top.  Pasta sauce (with and without meat), pizza sauce, ketchup, bbq sauce, and tomato soup, it's all fair game.  As of this posting, the garden as blessed us with 185 pound of tomatoes.  I planted indeterminate tomatoes, so barring hail, wind, blight, fungus, locust or plague we'll keep going until frost, which is usually about October 3-7th.  Even then, I'll work before the frost to harvest any and all light green tomatoes and put them up in the basement for further ripening, which usually nets me another 40 pounds after frost.  It is a crazy work load, that gets insanely tiring by the end of August, but in the dead of Winter, with the North winds howling, popping open a quart jar and hearing that familiar hiss of the seal breaking on a jar of your own tomato soup, is comfort food at its very best. It's the fuel that simmers the fire of the endless planning, blood, sweat, tears, bug bites, sunburn, and manure under the fingernails that the summer season brings. That warm bowl of soup helps set in motion the gardening amnesia that allows you to do it all over again, and again, and again.

That said, here is my recipe for Tomato Soup.  ( I have taken to canning tomato puree made with my KitchenAid puree attachment, which removes the skin and seeds and core and leaves me with nothing but juice and meat in the bowl.  I can do more at a moments notice with puree and I'm not stuck with too many of any one finished product at the end of the season.  So the majority of my processed tomatoes go into cooked down puree.)

• Simple Tomato Soup
• 3 cups chopped white onion (or one LARGE onion)
• 1 tablespoon minced fresh garlic (about two large cloves) OR 1/2 teaspoon of garlic POWDER
• 3 cups water, divided
• 1 quart (32 ounces) of either your crushed (no skins, no seeds) tomatoes  OR 1 quart of skinless, seedless tomato puree 
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano or Italian Seasoning
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt - NO IODINE salt 
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly cracked black pepper
• 1-3 teaspoons of granulated white sugar, divided
• and have some baking soda handy.

In a three to four quart pot, toss in your onion and about a half a cup of water, and cook at medium to medium high heat,  until the onion is translucent.  At this point, add your garlic and cook for about one minute, stirring to prevent the garlic from scorching.  Add the remaining water, the tomato product of your choice, the oregano/Italian seasoning, salt, pepper, and ONE Tablespoon of the sugar.  Mix and lower the heat and bring to a simmer for 15 minutes.  I then take an immersion blender to make it a homogeneous, smooth soup.

At this point it comes down to personal taste. And you will need to take this in stages, and just don't dump things in all at once.  Each batch of tomatoes, even canned from the store will vary - some are sweeter, some more or less acidic.

If it tastes too metallic- add a little more of your reserved sugar, mix and cook another 5 minutes and taste again.

If it is too acidic - add 1/8th of a teaspoon of baking soda.  It WILL fizz as you mix it in.  Wait another 5 minutes and taste again.  

You can also add more of any of the seasonings to include more onion (in the form of powder), more garlic (in the form of powder) or any of the seasonings above. 

EVERY batch will require a different amount of everything and every person has a different idea of how it should taste.

SO make it yours! Serve with toast, or an ooey gooey grilled cheese sandwich.  Sprinkle it with parmesan cheese and croutons or a flotilla of oyster crackers!

But most of all, sit down with a seed catalog and a notebook and start planning!