Fair in the Rain

We went up to the Fair two days ago, the weather was rainy but not super windy. It was the little bit of Hurricane Ian that reached New England, I guess. Generally, I prefer to be at the Fair in the rain because fewer people go so it doesn't feel as crowded. 

From the canning perspective, I won first place for sauerkraut and for tomato (pizza) sauce, and second place for the mulberry jelly, raspberry jam, and salsa verde. I didn't bake anything for the baking competition, but I did spend Friday baking a cake for the elderchild's birthday. More on that later.

One of the most fun parts for us is seeing the rabbits, and this year we spent some time watching the judging of some larger rabbits. There are these little stalls with wire doors that flip up so the rabbits are put in one side and the judge takes them out the other side and examines them. The rest of the rabbits, though, are all trying to get out of the stalls, and so every so often a rabbit's head pokes up above the stalls and a person has to hurry and push it back down before it jumps out. It's like whack-a-mole, but gently and with rabbits. It was so funny to watch!

After about four hours, we headed home, and I spent the rest of the afternoon frosting the cake I'd made and making chile rellenos for dinner.

Ah, the cake. The elderchild requested a red velvet cake like the one on this season's Great British Bake Off (the technical challenge). I looked up their recipe and, after making a run up to Saugus to get 6" cake pans which I discovered I needed right when I was about to start preparing the ingredients, followed the recipe to the letter. It SANK. I'm not sure why. So I cleaned up, went back out to the store to get more red food coloring and cocoa, and used a different recipe, which worked. And tasted really good, I might add. I did use the frosting from the GBBO recipe, which tasted great, but it was so runny. I had to put a skewer in the cake to keep it upright while I tried to frost it. There was a lot of cursing. 

Ultimately, the cake tasted fantastic, even if it was not as smoothly frosted as the ones on TV. 

Happy Birthday!

Still Tomato Season

This week I was able to bring home another bag of plum tomatoes from the farm. It must have been about 12 pounds! Today I ran them through the food mill, yielding 16 cups of purée. Once it cooked down, I was able to can six pints of tomato sauce. Three pints have Persian spices and three pints are plain. It's a lot of work to get the purée and makes a big mess but it is worth it to have homemade tomato sauce. 

I miss the Jolly tomatoes the farm used to plant - these were nice to can whole since they were incredibly uniform in size. The closest I've seen lately were the weird hybrids mixed in with the Sungolds. When I went back this past week, they'd all split due to the recent rain and there weren't any good ones left. I wonder how many more weeks we'll get decent tomatoes before the weather catches up with us?

Tomato Sauce

Last week the farm share was still flush with tomatoes. I grabbed as many plum tomatoes as I could carry and let them ripen for a few days on the counter. Tonight I processed them through the food mill, getting 13 cups of purée which I then cooked down to 6 cups of sauce. Each pint has a sprig of basil, some lemon juice and salt. Maybe there will still be more this week? It's been warm enough and there were still plenty of green ones on the vines. Having a lot of tomato sauce around has been really handy. 

In the row of sungold cherry tomatoes, which I love, I found a single plant that appears to have been some sort of cross between a larger red tomato and sungolds. Or something. It might have been a random heirloom seedling that got mixed in. Anyway, these tomatoes were about 1.5 inches across, deep greenish-red, and flavorful. I made a tomato tart out of most of the ones I picked. Yum.

Thanks to the elderchild, I've been introduced to a YouTube series called Pasta Grannies. They're incredibly inspiring. I may have to start making more pasta by hand!

Unlimited Tomatoes

This past week at the farm, we were instructed we could pick unlimited tomatoes. Turns out, the limiting factor was how much I could carry. Between the plum tomatoes I've frozen from prior weeks and the tomatoes I lugged across the field, I had enough purée to make a full batch of pizza sauce. 13 cups of purée, 1/2 cup lemon juice, spices (I used Ferla Spice, salt, pepper, and garlic powder) and time. I ended up with four 12-ounce jars and four 8-ounce jars. I followed the recipe in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.

After checking with the woman who runs the canning competition at the fair, I will enter this in the "Tomato Sauce" category, rather than the "Spaghetti Sauce" category. 

As of today, I have five things to enter. Last year I had four. The maximum a person can enter is ten classes (it used to be fifteen, I am not sure when that changed). I think I'm done, and can spend the next few days getting everything labeled correctly. They need to be dropped off on Saturday. 

If there are more tomatoes next week at the farm, I will try to get some to make a batch of regular tomato sauce, as I've been out of that for a while as well. 

Keeping Up

Last week at the farm I grabbed more plum tomatoes, which seemed like a lot at the time but cooked down to only two pints of tomato sauce - lots of Striped Roman heirloom plums, a few Romas, and the better part of a quart of sungolds. The share included two quarts of sungolds, but I only picked one. We just can't eat them fast enough! There is only a month left at the farm, and I expect that we'll be moving more into the winter squashes soon. For now there are lots of carrots, peppers, eggplant, onions, and greens, plus a few handfuls of raspberries. 

Yellow Heirloom Tomatoes

Last week at the farm, instead of picking plum tomatoes (they were pretty picked over by the time I got there) I picked a bunch of yellow tomatoes. These are some form of heirloom tomato, but I don't know which one. It might be a Yellow Oxheart. It might be a Lillian's Yellow. Or something completely different. Regardless, they're large, they're uniformly yellow, and they're very sweet. Last year I made a salsa amarillo out of them. This year, I'm on a pizza sauce kick, so I made a batch of yellow tomato pizza sauce.

Well, really, it turns out orange when it's cooked down. We'll call it Golden Pizza Sauce. 

Puzzling

The tomatoes from last week are finally ripe and I made another batch of pizza sauce. Despite having more purée from the same number of tomatoes, I ended up with fewer jars of sauce. Which is odd, considering it's the same thickness as the previous batch. I guess these tomatoes were just juicier to begin with? Anyway, I ended up with 4 cups of sauce. This way, even if the rest of the tomatoes at the farm aren't great, I still have a lot of pizza sauce until next season rolls around.

Pizza and Doughnuts

Due to the frequent rain the tomato crop at the farm share has been limited. We're expecting more rain over the next few days so yesterday they said we could pick 15 large tomatoes each in addition to the sungold cherry tomatoes. I picked plum tomatoes and set to work this morning making pizza sauce, which is something that we use a lot of throughout the year. 15 tomatoes made a half-batch of sauce, about 4.5 cups. 

But that isn't nearly as exciting as doughnuts! Last Saturday I took a recreational cooking class at the culinary school and it was all about doughnuts. Mmm. In pairs we made a batch of yeasted doughnuts that were then deep fried; my partner and I opted for Boston Cream. It is, after all, a classic. And a favorite of this family for sure. Each student could also make their own batch of cake doughnuts; the choices were apple cider, gingerbread and Devil's Food; I made the Devil's Food and my partner made gingerbread and we shared the results. I also made a humongous batch of chocolate glaze which we shared with other groups and also the chef instructor planned to keep the rest and use it the next day. 

All in all, the doughnuts were tasty and easy, and now I have another pan to buy....

Batch #2

Using every spare moment I had today, between picking up the farm share, running to the store twice, and driving around for both the children, I managed to make another batch of applesauce, this time with brown sugar because I don't yet want to open the new bag of white sugar. Plus I am making this Sicilian-Style Fish Stew with fish my brother-in-law gave me that he caught, and changing pretty much everything else. No golden raisins? How about barberries? No onion? Use a leek! Add escarole!

T Minus Something

The contracts are signed. The appliances are on order. The cabinets are under construction. We have a plan. 

Starting next week, maybe Monday, maybe later, depending on the permitting process, we demolish the kitchen and two of our three bathrooms. The contractor is taking pity on us and not destroying the only bathroom with a shower until he can get the third bathroom, the original one with a tub and soldered brass pipes, replumbed. Since we're finally going to be able to reach the pipes. Once that is done, we can have a makeshift shower in there until everything else is finished. 

What I'm discovering is that packing up a kitchen while I'm still trying to use it is stressful and hard. I'm trying to empty the fridge and that's not easy either. I also don't have enough boxes. 

Today I used up the eggplant and tomatoes from the farm share to make another batch of caponata. The color is off because I used an heirloom variety that is more yellow than red. But it's still caponata and it still tastes good. It'll make a nice sauce for pasta in a pinch. 

Spaghetti Sauce

Last week's farm share tomato haul was about 11 pounds of plum tomatoes which ripened by the window over the weekend. Today I puréed them in the food mill and then cooked them down with some garlic, onion, celery, oregano, salt, pepper and brown sugar. This was the recipe I was following. From 11 pounds of tomatoes I got 16 cups of purée which then cooked down to 8 cups of sauce. That's now canned into two quart jars and I have more things to store in my soon-to-be-nonexistent pantry. 

Pizza Sauce

Last week at the farm share there were plum tomatoes in addition to the heirloom and other tomatoes. We could pick 15 of the plum tomatoes so I kept them, letting my friend have all the heirlooms in return. They were pretty green when I picked them; they ripened all weekend in a bowl near the window and today I made them into pizza sauce. 

I did add a couple of plum tomatoes from my own plants, but that hardly made an impact. 

Once everything was run through the food mill I had 10 cups of purée which was cooked down with lemon juice, garlic, oregano, salt and pepper, and turned into 6.5 cups of pizza sauce. That should last us for the better part of a year, I hope! 

Salsa Amarillo

Before I head out to the farm tomorrow for more tomatoes, I needed to finish what I had in the house. That included what was left of the big-as-your-head tomato I used for last night's tomato tart, and also 2 large golden heirloom tomatoes. I thought maybe I could make a salsa that preserved that yellow color. So I roasted the tomatoes with half a large onion and six yellow Hungarian hot wax peppers. I also roasted a jalapeño but I ended up not adding it as I didn't want to affect the color of the salsa and, after tasting it with just the wax peppers, it was hot enough. 

The proportions were: 1 quart tomatoes, 1 cup onion, 6 wax peppers (about a cup? maybe?), 1 T. salt, 4 tsp. sugar, just under 2 T. vinegar. 

The salsa is a beautiful golden color, and tastes amazing, so I consider that a success!

Mystery at the Door

This morning, just before I was heading out to do a few errands, my husband saw someone pull up in front of the house, run up the steps and leave something at the door. He disappeared back into his car before my husband could see him clearly, so instead we went to the door and found a small jar of pesto. Who could have brought me pesto? There were a few options. We decided to put it in the fridge until we figured out the identity of our mysterious benefactor.

A few hours later I got a text from a friend from culinary school, identifying himself as the bringer-of-pesto, made with basil from his garden. I had loaned him my bee suit a few weeks ago and he wanted to thank me. Little did he know, I had been eyeing a recipe that required pesto and had been wondering if I needed to buy some. Now I could make the recipe today!

The recipe was for a tomato tart that was in the New York Times over the weekend. I have been getting heirloom tomatoes from the farm share and there was this one tomato that was likely almost 2 pounds all by itself. It had been ripening on the windowsill and it was time to do something with it. Everything was coming together nicely. I made the crust and par-baked it, spread it with the pesto, mozzarella cheese, fresh basil and oregano from my garden, and then arranged the tomato slices and topped it all with an egg custard.

It was so good, even the youngerchild ate a slice. And pretty much every ingredient except the cheese is usually a no-go. 

Before adding the custard

After baking

Back to the Favorites

In previous years, when I was flush with tomatoes and eggplant, I made a lot of Roxanne's caponata. Sadly, for the past few years I haven't had the right ingredients at the right time, but this year there have been a lot of eggplant in the farm share. The tomatoes are just starting so it's possible I'll be able to make more but, for today, I was able to make 3.5 pints of caponata. I've missed it! In general, I substitute green bell pepper for the celery and this time I didn't have red wine vinegar so I used cider vinegar which worked just fine. 

Tomato Sauce

In the ongoing effort to organize the freezers, it was time to get the bags of quartered tomatoes out from last summer. Usually I end up with about 5 gallons of tomatoes but this year it was only 3. They take up so much space, because they're bulky and heavy. It is amazing to me that each gallon, once run through the food mill and cooked down to a reasonable sauce texture, yields one pint of sauce. Makes one wonder about the sheer amount of tomatoes those big companies use to make all those cans of sauce!

These three pints are plain, not spiced in any way.

Also, I just finished baking this week's batch of bread; I added even more milk instead of water to see how soft I can make the bread and still have it be sturdy enough for sandwiches. I've been trying to get flour where I can; I have enough bread flour for 2 more batches, and I bought some spelt flour just to try something different when the bread flour runs out. I am starting to see more flour in the grocery store, but it's all purpose, not bread flour, and so I'll keep an eye out for bread flour. 

Spaghetti Sauce

For a while now I've been meaning to make spaghetti sauce. Since I've been on a roll with plum tomatoes from the farm share, I thought this week I could try this recipe for spaghetti sauce and make a few jars. Yesterday I picked about 13 pounds of plum tomatoes and today, while waiting to get my chimney swept, I started a half batch. It took roughly four hours to cook to the right consistency and then a while to get it all canned (mainly because I had to take the youngerchild back to school for a club meeting which is a 40 minute round-trip so I had to wait until I got back to actually boil the water in the canner).

Ultimately I ended up with a little more than four quarts of sauce. I quite like it, I do think the soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce add depth and a little punch to the flavor. Plus, I used a bunch of onions and peppers from the share so that helped make a dent in the huge piles of vegetables I've accumulated over the past few weeks.

The other thing I did today was make a compound butter with duck fat. To properly experience this glorious creation we made corn bread for dinner and it was, indeed, lovely.

The Tomatoes Are Still Going Strong

This week at the farm we continued with the unlimited availability of peppers, tomatoes, kale and herbs. I heard there were also green beans but I never did find them. Regardless, after the success with the pizza sauce last week I thought I'd try tomato sauce again. I picked enough plum tomatoes to make 20 cups of tomato purée so I made a larger batch of the "Italian-Style Tomato Sauce" in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. The one change I made was that since I didn't have celery I used a bulb of fennel instead. After cooking everything down, I ended up with just under 7 pints of sauce. I vaguely remember making this recipe before, and it isn't really spaghetti sauce, but I suppose I could use it as a base and add meat.

There are four more weeks of the farm share and then the season will be over. I have started to accumulate a lot of squash and onions which should last for at least a month after the distribution ends for the year.

Week Summary

Currently, I have a batch of pizza sauce in the canner. This is another thing I've not made before but since the farm share keeps offering unlimited produce I felt like it was a thing to try. I brought home just over 9 pounds of plum tomatoes yesterday, just enough to make a batch, using the recipe in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, page 366. For this, I used the 12 ounce jars, since I feel that we often open a jar of pizza sauce and then only use half of it. Maybe this is still too much in a jar but we'll just have to commit to using more of it.

Also this week I turned in all my canning entries so I'm done making canned goods for the fair. I'm not done making things for the fair, though, but now we've turned to the baking part. In an experiment, I made my usual bread with a few changes in technique. First of all, I made the bread with all bread flour and a whole lot more water: 16 ounces starter (Legion), 38 ounces bread flour, 4 T. sugar, roughly 22-24 ounces water, 2 T. salt. Then I turned the dough into an oiled bowl and used the pinch and turn technique I used most recently for the baguettes a few weeks ago. This dough is much stiffer and difficult to do this way but I wanted to see what happened. What did happen was we got a nice, spongy crumb with a few extra air pockets in it. Not what I expected but still very good. I might try a few more tweaks before I have to make a batch for the fair.

Lastly, I made a cheesecake using the honey cheesecake recipe that won last year in the baking with honey division. I'd never actually tried it again so had no idea how it was. Well, it may now be my go-to cheesecake. It was the smoothest cheesecake I've ever made, and it didn't crack, either! My trick there was to turn the oven off just before I though it was done and then leave it in the oven to cool down more slowly. And so easy: 2 pounds of cream cheese, 2/3 cup honey, 4 eggs and some vanilla, poured over a graham cracker crust and baked at 300˚F for about an hour.

I'm still trying to decide what to bake for the fair in general. It depends on which day I can go on that first weekend as there are different categories competing on different days. I won't really know which day I can go until much closer to the actual weekend. It's also Parents' Weekend for the youngerchild's school and I'm starting a new job that week as well!

Tomato Jam

One thing I have never been particularly convinced of was tomato jam. Every time I received a jar via my mom's neighbors it was a solid gelatinous lump of tomato, not particularly spreadable. But I try to keep an open mind and, since I have so many tomatoes from the farm, thought it might be time to make this and see for myself.

A little online research and I found this recipe, with fresh ginger and not requiring me to peel the tomatoes. I had 4.5 pounds of tomatoes so scaled up the recipe and got it simmering. After about an hour and a half (maybe the hotplate was too high...) it had cooked down into the right texture. Not gelatinous, much more spreadable. It tastes like spicy ketchup and it's really, really good.

As a good rough estimate, 1 pound of tomatoes equals one cup of jam at the end. Everything just came out of the canner now and I can't wait to use it as a spread!