Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [100]
At this point in the year, we had officially moved beyond hobby scale. My records would show eventually whether we were earning more than minimum wage, but for certain we would answer the question that was largely the point of this exercise: what does it take, literally, to keep a family fed? Organizing the spring planting had been tricky. How many pumpkins does a family eat in a year? How many jars of pickles? My one area of confidence was tomatoes: we couldn’t have too many. We loved them fresh, sliced, in soups and salads, as pasta sauces, chutneys, and salsa. I’d put in fifty plants.
In July, all seemed to be going according to plan when we hauled in just over 50 pounds of tomatoes. In August the figure jumped to 302 pounds. In the middle of that month, our neighbor came over while I was canning. I narrowed my eyes and asked her, “Did I let you give me some tomatoes a few weeks ago?”
She laughed. She didn’t want them back, either.
Just because we’re overwhelmed doesn’t mean we don’t still love them, even after the first thrill wears off. I assure my kids of this, when they point out a similar trend in their baby books: dozens of photos of the first smile, first bath, first steps…followed by little evidence that years two and three occurred at all. Tomatoes (like children) never achieve the villainous status of squash—they’re too good to wear out their welcome, and if they nearly do, our in-town friends are always happy to take them. Fresh garden tomatoes are so unbelievably tasty, they ruin us utterly and forever on the insipid imports available in the grocery. In defiance of my childhood training, I cannot clean my salad plate in a restaurant when it contains one of those anemic wedges that taste like slightly sour water with a mealy texture. I’m amazed those things keep moving through the market, but the world apparently has tomato-eaters for whom “kinda reddish” is qualification enough. A taste for better stuff is cultivated only through experience.
Drowning in good tomatoes is the exclusive privilege of the gardener and farm-market shopper. The domain of excess is rarely the lot of country people, so we’ll take this one when we get it. From winter I always look back on a season of bountiful garden tomatoes and never regret having eaten a single one.
At what point did we realize we were headed for a family tomato harvest of 20 percent of a ton? We had a clue when they began to occupy every horizontal surface in our kitchen. By mid-August tomatoes covered the countertops end to end, from the front edge to the backsplash. No place to set down a dirty dish, forget it, and no place to wash it, either. The sink stayed full of red orbs bobbing in their wash water. The stovetop stayed covered with baking sheets of halved tomatoes waiting for their turn in the oven. The cutting board stayed full, the knives kept slicing.
August is all about the tomatoes, every year. That’s nothing new. For a serious gardener, the end of summer is when you walk into the kitchen and see red. We roast them in a slow oven, especially the sweet orange Jaune Flammes, which are just the right size to slice in half, sprinkle with salt and thyme, and bake for several hours until they resemble cow flops (the recipe says “shoes,” if you prefer). Their slow-roasted, caramelized flavor is great in pizzas and panini, so we freeze hundreds of them in plastic bags. We also slice and slide them into the drawers of the food dryer, which runs 24–7. (“Sun-dried” sounds classy, but Virginia’s sun can’t compete with our southern humidity; a low-voltage dryer renders an identical product.) We make sauce in huge quantity, packed and processed in canning jars. By season’s end our pantry shelves are lined with quarts of whole tomatoes, tomato juice, spaghetti sauce, chutney, several kinds of salsa, and our favorite sweet-sour sauce based on our